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ATTACHMENT 7 "I was trying hard to keep EPA involved in the Workgroup while I was there and I was successful keeping them involved until I left," Schuknecht said. "That was my desire. With them involved, it helped encourage work within the group and kept scrap tires on people's minds. I think it was a positive thing." The Workgroup continues to promote the material without the EPA's involvement. One of its members, the Rubber Manufacturers Association, calls the use of recycled tires across the nation "an environmental success story." In 2013, 96 percent of scrap tires discarded that year were recycled for various markets. The nation's scrap tire stockpile dropped from 1 billion in 1990 to 75 million tires in 2013, according to the association. Putting recycled tires on playgrounds and turf not only cleans up the environment and reduces water use, it provides recreational space that can be used far more often because, unlike real grass, it doesn't need time to recover, Zielinski said. 'Government failure' Public health toxicologist David Brown said the government failed the people. "The studies that have been done are narrow and mostly funded by the industry or waste bureaus hying to get rid of tires," said Brown, who is the past chief of environmental epidemiology at Connecticut's Department of Public Health and currently works with the Connecticut-based advocacy group Environmental and Human Health Inc., which opposes the use of recycled tires where children play due to health concerns. "The objective work that needs to be done hasn't been done," Brown said. "I see it as a governmental failure across the board that really we should try to learn from. We should ask the question, 'Who was responsible for determining the safety of these things?'"