Ontario’s tire recycling industry is grinding to a halt again, causing hundreds of tires to pile up at numerous tire dealers and garages throughout the province.
The backlog is threatening to put haulers, who transport tires from tire dealers to recyclers, out of work.
The Ontario Tire Dealers Associations said it has been contacted by hundreds of tire businesses across the province that are reporting piles ranging from hundreds to thousands of tires on their sites.
Critics blame the problem on the Ford government’s reduction in tire recycling targets.
“Collection sites are dealing with landlord, municipal, and insurance-related pressures, with no clear understanding of when or how the system will be repaired,” said Adam Moffatt, executive director of the Ontario Tire Dealers Association.
At the end of 2024, the Ford government amended the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, reducing a requirement for tire manufacturers to manage 85 per cent of the tires they supply to the province annually to 65 per cent as of January 2025.
By the end of 2025, hundreds of thousands of tires were stockpiled at sites in Sudbury and Ottawa as producer responsibility organizations (PROs) — private organizations that manage recycling on behalf of tire manufacturers — slowed down the collection of tires from garages and tire dealers, and reduced the volume going to recyclers.
The province also amended the act to reduce the number of collection sites that a PRO was responsible for, which together with the lower recycling target means that there are thousands of garages and tire dealers in the province that PROs don’t need tires from to meet their targets.
The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) said in an email that “our expectation remains that producers and PROs collect and manage all end-of-life tires as they become available.”
One tire dealer says he can’t even get tires picked up from his business because the recycling system is so stymied.
“The challenge that I’m running into here is that these tires are just piling up,” said Miles Artus, the owner of New Millennium Tire and Auto Center in Oakville.
“There’s nowhere for them to go,” said Artus, who processes between 80 and 150 cars a day. “There’s no where for the hauler to take them. And I just got off the phone with a recycler and he flat out told me that they’re over capacity. They cannot take the tires.”
Consumers in Ontario fund the province’s tire recycling program by paying a fee on every tire they purchase.
But neither the ministry, nor the Resource Recovery and Productivity Authority, which enforces Ontario’s recycling regulations, have explained why there’s such a backlog in the system.
RPRA said in an email that it is “aware of the current challenges many tire dealers are experiencing getting their used tires picked up for recycling,” but said the issues are unrelated to RPRA’s role as an agency that enforces the recycling act.
The Ford government is proposing to fix the problem by amending the tire regulations once again.
One new requirement is that PROs will have to collect tires from a site with more than 50 tires that requests a pickup, and offer a guaranteed response time during busy seasons. The amendment also includes a requirement that the collected tires must be managed, or recycled, within three months of pickup from any site.
But those amendments have yet to go through and many in the industry think the only way to fix the problem is to increase the recycling target.
The province said that it is working with RPRA “to ensure that producers and producer responsibility organizations continue to operate their collection and recycling networks, so tires are picked up, sorted and processed in a timely fashion,” according the email from the ministry.
In the meantime, Moffatt says that haulers are reporting quota restrictions that are forcing them to scale down operations.
“Others have shut down entirely due to a lack of economic viability,” said Moffatt. “Processing facilities are still not operating at full capacity in the province, leaving tire dealers and collection sites to absorb the consequences of a system that is not functioning as intended.”
Rick Sultana, who owns Dependable Cartage and Disposal, said his contract as a hauler was cancelled by one of Ontario’s largest PROs in May.
Sultana said he thinks the reason is that other haulers are bringing in large truckloads of tires from the stockpiles that accumulated at the end of last year, which means PROs don’t need loads from small haulers like him.
And if the PRO he had the contract with does send a hauler to the Burlington businesses that Sultana has serviced for years, it’s a hauler of their choice.
“I’ve had my own customers tell me that they don’t want anybody else picking up their tires,” said Sultana. “They’ve been calling me for 15 years. Why should they be getting somebody else?”
PW
Patty Winsa is a Toronto-based business reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: pwinsa@thestar.ca.
