Consumers of name brand tires such as Pirelli, Michelin and Goodyear could pay more in recycling fees despite a significant reduction by the province in recycling targets for tire manufacturers.
eTracks, the producer responsibility organization (PRO) that manages recycling for those companies as well as other major tire producers, announced it was increasing its fees, which typically trickle down from manufacturers to consumers as what is referred to as an environmental handling fee, or eco fee.
As of Aug. 1, the fee eTracks is charging, which is unregulated, is $6 per passenger tire, up from $5 in January, which was an adjustment from a rate of $4.50 per tire the previous year.
Used tires have been recently piling up at many Ontario waste depots and a number of municipalities have stopped accepting tire drop offs from residents because eTracks hasn’t been clearing them out fast enough.
“The province continues to experience a significant and inexplicable increase in scrap tires requiring physical collection and recycling services,” said Melissa Carlaw, eTracks’ vice president of communications and sustainability, when asked in an email about the increase in fees, noting a large increase in the number of used tires from 2023 to 2024.
“Our fee adjustment is intended to support the physical collection, transportation and recycling of these growing volumes of tires,” said Carlaw, “and to ensure reliable access to tire collection services across Ontario in spite of increasing fuel costs and inflation.”
Ford government lowered recycling target to 65% from 85%
However, Carlaw didn’t say what was being done with the eco fees that tire manufacturers recoup on sales of new tires that ultimately, may not get recycled because of the province’s lowered target.
The tire recycling industry in Ontario was upended when the Ford government lowered tire recycling targets from an 85 per cent collection and management rate to a 65 per cent management rate as of January, 2025.
In the wake of the lower target, industry insiders say PROs either slowed down tire collection and processing during the year because they didn’t need as many tires to meet the lower target, or they stopped partway through the year after the target had been met.
eTracks is one of several PROs in the province, but they are the biggest, representing nearly 70 per cent of tire producers, which refers to tire manufacturers, importers, or companies that sell products with tires.
Earlier this year, the slowdown resulted in stockpiles of hundreds of thousands of old tires at storage sites in Sudbury and Ottawa.
During the crisis, some tire dealers have had to pay to arrange for their own tire pickups, even as consumers are paying the eco fees, or risk having unsafe stockpiles of tires on their commercial sites because some PROs were picking up tires less frequently or not at all because they didn’t need the tires to reach their target.
Eco fee could be embedded into the price of the tire
“No tire dealer, collection site, or consumer in Ontario should be paying a tire recycling fee while being told their tires are not part of the recycling network and do not qualify for recycling services,” said Adam Moffatt, executive director of the Ontario Tire Dealers Association.
“Since the current regulation does not set or oversee tire recycling fees, the (ministry of environment) should, at a minimum, ensure that if recycling fees are being charged, the services those fees are being provided,” said Moffatt.
The provincial environment ministry has proposed new regulations that it believes will fix the backlog, including a requirement that PROs collect from any site with 50 or more tires available for collection, and then send them on for recycling within three months of pick up.
A spokesperson for the ministry of the environment said the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, 2016, makes producers responsible for collecting and diverting old tires.
“The regulations do not require producers to charge an environmental fee,” the spokesperson said. “Any fees charged by a producer are a business decision by that producer, and not a government tax.”
In other words, the fees are unregulated.
“PROs operate in a competitive free market and set their own fees for the services they offer,” said Wilson Lee, chief of programs and public affairs of the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority, which oversees recycling in the province but is “not involved in operational (or financial) matters related to recycling.”
Retailers may list the eco fee on a customer’s receipt or the fee can be embedded in the price of a tire, meaning the cost of recycling or retreading used tires is not visible.
Many factors explain why number of tires collected went up
“How producers and/or retailers choose to price their tires,” said Lee, “is a business decision over which RPRA has no prerogative.”
Moffat said that technically, producers could decide not to pass the recycling fee on to retailers, who then pass them on to consumers, but “in practice, I am not aware of any producers (major producers anyway) absorbing the recycling costs rather than passing them on.”
As to the large year-over-year increase in scrap tires that Carlaw of eTracks referred to as “inexplicable,” Lee said that there is no mystery as to why the volume of scrap tires could have increased.
“There may be several factors to explain why collected tires went up,” said Lee, including changes in consumer behaviour, changes to collection and management systems, improvements in tire processing technologies or even decisions by different PROs about how much to collect and process.
