High Tech Toxics and the Right-to-Know Movement in Silicon Valley

During the 1980s, in the wake of public exposure of a major groundwater disaster in Silicon Valley that was linked to leaking underground storage tanks at high tech facilities, a local anti-toxics resistance coalition of labor, community, and environmental advocates emerged. The organizing efforts of this coalition were grounded primarily in public consciousness raising and the development of environmental legislation, and the common thread of their advocacy campaigns was publicizing and expanding access to information about high tech industrial environmental hazards. This coalition launched a series of grassroots advocacy campaigns in the 1980s that built on the momentum of the Right-to-Know movement to demand more transparency and accountability from the high tech industry concerning its role in the production of environmental hazards. Drawing from qualitative interviews and archival research, this paper explains how one of the key strategies of domination historically employed by Silicon Valley’s high tech industry to exploit local workers and ecosystems was the systematic production of public ignorance about the environmental hazards of electronics manufacturing. Additionally, this paper analyzes the resistance strategies employed by anti-toxics activists to hold the industry accountable for the environmental hazards to which it exposes workers and communities.