Ontario is proposing to once again change the rules that govern tire recycling after a tumultuous year in the industry.
Critics have blamed the turmoil on previous provincial amendments that lowered recycling targets for the years 2025 to 2029.
The proposed changes, posted to the Environmental Registry of Ontario site on Thursday, include a requirement that tire processors collect used tires from any site, such as garages or car dealers that request a pickup and have more than 50 tires. The processors must also provide a guaranteed response time for those pickups during peak tire changeover seasons.
The amendments also include a requirement that the tires are managed, which means recycled, repurposed or retreaded, within three months of being collected.
But a critic says the amendments don’t go far enough to avoid the tire stockpiling that occurred in Sudbury and Ottawa last year. The stockpiles appeared after the organizations that handle tire recycling met the lowered target before the year was out and slowed down efforts to collect and process tires, or stopped altogether.
“My general feeling is the simplest way is the best,” said Maury Shnier, the founder and president of Mobius PRO Services, one of the smaller tire producer responsibility organizations (PROs) in the province. “And the simplest way to make things get recycled is to have high targets.”
PROs manage recycling on behalf of tire manufacturers as well as companies that sell products with tires, which are referred to collectively in the industry “producers.”
The environment ministry didn’t respond to a question about why it didn’t increase the recycling target, which has been favoured by numerous critics of the current system, by publication time.
In Thursday’s online statement, the government says the proposed amendments are “intended to strengthen Ontario’s framework to better support waste diversion and set clear, enforceable requirements for producers.”
The move comes after the tire recycling industry hit a crisis point in late 2025 in the wake of changes made by the province to the Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act in December of 2024.
Then, the province reduced the required 85 per cent collection and management rate for tires to a 65 per cent management rate, which means tire companies have to recycle, reuse or retread 65 per cent of the tires, by weight, that they sell in Ontario. The province also decreased the required number of sites a PRO had to collect from.
The result was not only stockpiles of tires at the end of 2025, but garages and autobody shops that couldn’t get their used tires picked up for processing because PROs were getting enough tires from other sites to meet the lowered recycling target.
Tire haulers became concerned about going out of business.
The Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks said in January that it was ensuring the stockpiles were being cleaned up, but there was never any public indication as to who was at fault.
One of the largest PROs in the province, eTracks, which was founded by the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada, has said it continued to collect tires in 2025 after reaching targets on behalf of its producers, which include Bridgestone and Goodyear.
eTracks said in an email that it was too early to comment on the government’s proposed amendments.
“But we’ll be providing input,” said Melissa Carlaw, vice-president of communications and sustainability at eTracks. “We’re as concerned as anyone about getting things back to normal.”
Shnier also said that after his company continued to pick up tires after reaching its 2025 targets.
“Mobius overperformed relative to our obligation by almost double,” said Shnier. “We kept collecting, even though our customers (tire companies) only funded a portion of our activities,” he said.
Last year’s crisis upended a typically robust industry that existed for years under Ontario Tire Stewardship, a government-created tire recycling program, and then under an individual producer responsibility (IPR) framework brought in by the province in 2019.
Under the IPR framework, tire companies, by way of PROs, are directly responsible for collecting tires and meeting recycling targets, a process that is ultimately paid for by consumers, who are typically charged an eco-fee on new tire purchases.
The province has never fully explained why it lowered the recycling target, but the industry had previously complained that the government’s original recycling target of 85 per cent under the IPR framework was impossible to meet.
The proposed amendments on Thursday also pushed back the introduction of recycling targets for oil and antifreeze containers a year to 2028.
