A Windsor tire processor says he had to import used tires from the U.S. to keep his recycling plant fully operational in 2025, even as illegal stockpiles of excess Canadian tires were piling up at two sites in Ontario.
“While there are tires accumulating in some parts of the province, they are not accumulating due to a lack of processing capacity within the province,” Kyle Gregoire told the Star in an email, “nor due to any lack of desire from processors to prioritize Ontario supply.”
The U.S. tire imports Gregoire had to resort to are just the latest twist in an Ontario program that mandates the province’s used tires be repurposed, retreaded, or recycled at plants such as Gregoire’s.
Critics say the once world-class program has been weakened after the provincial government lowered the recycling target that tire producers — companies that sell tires, or products with tires, and which are responsible for the cost and administration of recycling — had to meet last year, which reduced access to local tires for recyclers such as Gregoire.
Once tire producers met the lowered target for 2025, some stopped processing tires and stockpiles in Sudbury and Ottawa, estimated to contain hundreds of thousands of tires, began to accumulate, despite eco-fees typically charged to consumers to pay for recycling.
“It’s remarkable that despite a surplus of tires in the province, a processor has had to import waste from the U.S. just to maintain operations,” said Adam Moffatt, executive director of the Ontario Tire Dealers Association.
Gregoire sells the processed material from tires, called crumb, to a number of different customers throughout Ontario, including playground manufacturers and moulded goods companies.
“We can’t make enough crumb in this province,” said Gregoire.
The Ontario Ministry of the Environment said in an email that it is working with the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority (RPRA), which oversees recycling in the province, “to address these disruptions to the collection and processing of end-of-life tires.”
Ontario’s tire recycling program dates back to 2009 when Ontario Tire Stewardship (OTS) was created by the provincial government. The private organization, funded by mandatory tire fees paid by consumers, ran until 2018, but was marred by reports of improper spending, some of it on lavish dinners and events planned around board meetings.
However, “under that program, there were no tire stockpiles because the requirement was to collect and process all the tires in Ontario,” said Usman Valiante, a former OTS board member, who added that numerous stockpiles throughout the province were whittled down to nothing during OTS’s tenure.
In 2019, the province brought in a new structure for recycling called “individual producer responsibility.” Multiple private companies, called Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs), now manage recycling for tire producers.
But about a year after tire producers began to be fully accountable under the new structure, including the prospect of facing fines for not meeting targets, the province lowered the recycling target.
Instead of an 85 per cent collection and management rate, tire producers have to meet a 65 per cent management rate for the years 2025 to 2029. This means they have to reuse, recycle or repurpose 65 per cent by weight of the tires they put on the market.
Throughout 2025, Gregoire said he couldn’t get enough used tires to keep his plant going at full capacity, although he did process some tires from Ryse Solutions, a PRO that collects tires in the Windsor-Essex area.
Gregoire said he requested tires from eTracks, the biggest PRO in the province and founded by the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada — whose members include Bridgestone, Goodyear and Michelin — but said he couldn’t get what he needed.
“I think they shipped us three trailers in the first three months of the year,” said Gregoire, explaining that one 53-foot trailer contains about 1,000 to 1,100 tires. “You just can’t survive on that.”
Melissa Carlaw, the vice-president of communications and sustainability for eTracks, said that any number of logistical factors could have made it difficult to arrange for a hauler to deliver tires to Granulum, the Windsor plant owned by Gregoire, suggesting in an email that eTracks may not have been able to meet Gregoire’s volume requirements or his schedule.
“If a processor can only accept tires at a very specific volume, on a specific day of the week, at specific times, specific load mixes and only from specific haulers,” said Carlaw, “it can make it difficult for eTracks as the customer to arrange the precise volumes at those specific times to the specs of a service provider processor.”
In early 2025, Gregoire’s plant was processing up to 4,000 tires a day. The tires are cut down by machines into crumb, pieces typically one to three millimetres in size, separating the fibre and the steel from the rubber.
One 10 kilogram tire yields about seven kilograms of rubber, 1.5 kilograms of steel and 1.5 kilograms of fibre, said Gregoire.
The steel is recycled locally and the fibre — the only part of the tire considered unrecyclable — either goes to a landfill or to St. Mary’s Cement, where it’s burned in their kiln to offset natural gas consumption, he said.
Gregoire said he struck up a relationship with the owner of a recycling plant in Detroit and discovered the owner was cutting up unused tires that he didn’t need and shipping them to a Michigan landfill.
“The legislation in Michigan that exists today says that you cannot throw a whole tire into a landfill,” said Gregoire. “But if you just cut it up into eight inch chunks you can put those chunks into the landfill.”
The Detroit plant owner began shipping the tire pieces to Granulum because transporting the material to a landfill cost about the same, although it means Gregoire doesn’t receive any of the consumer eco-fees paid to Ontario tire producers, of which he would receive about $1.50 for each tire processed.
In September of last year, Gregoire added a second production line at his plant, ramping up processing at about the same time that some tire producers in the province had either reached the lower recycling target set by the province or were winding down operations. The tire stockpiles, estimated to have hundreds of thousands of tires, first came to light in December.
Gregoire’s plant now processes 6,000 to 8,000 tires a day and runs four days a week.
“My desire is always to have tires in our yard from Ontario first,” said Gregoire. “And I am sure it is eTracks’ and Ryse’s desire to also have that be the case,” he said.
“But I have no control over the logistics operations of eTracks or how many tires our hauler can provide to us locally.”
