‘We don’t have room’: Tires again piling up around Ontario as critics call for changes to recycling rules

Tires are piling up at sites around Ontario, including two sites visited by CTV News Toronto on Tuesday.

Ontario’s tire recycling system appears to be under pressure, with complaints of tires piling up at dealers, mechanics and other collection sites for weeks.

CTV News Toronto visited two sites in Etobicoke with hundreds of tires piled up with nowhere to go, just six months after the last time people in the industry sounded the alarm.

“We have more cars coming, more tires installing, where are we going to put the tires? We don’t have room,” said Amarjeet Singh, whose shop, GT Auto Repairs, has at least 100 tires piled up front.

He said he had called an agency to pick them up several times over the past three months, but nothing has happened.

“They used to come and pick up the tires every month or month and a half, no problem. But now I can see, since maybe two months or three months, nobody came,” he said.

Ontario’s regulated system requires tire producers to manage the recycling of the tires at the end of their lives. The agencies that do this are called Producer Responsibility Organizations, or PROs, using a per-tire fee of about $5 charged to the consumer.

Those PROs have reduced the number of collection sites during a busy time of year while many drivers are swapping winter for summer tires, said Adam Moffatt of the Ontario Tire Dealers Association.

“We’re getting reports from hundreds of collection sites across the province that they’re now stranded with hundreds to thousands of tires,” Moffatt said.

Ontario’s government has just wrapped up a consultation on proposed changes that would, among other things, require PROs to pick up tires from any site with more than 50 of them within a specified response time.

‘Teetering towards a tire crisis’

But the opposition NDP’s Tom Rakocevic said those changes don’t address the heart of the issue, which he said is that the quotas the government has set for the PROs are too low.

“We’re teetering towards a tire crisis,” Rakocevic said in an interview.

He’s calling for the recycling targets to be lifted from about 65 per cent, back to about 85 per cent, where they were in January 2025.

“The producers got together, lobbied the government. They dropped the target down to 65 per cent, and voila, you got tires everywhere because people are paying to recycle tires that are not getting recycled,” he said.

“We need to set targets so that every tire you purchase and pay for it to get recycled, and nothing less,” he said.

The piles are unsightly but they can also be dangerous. In Hagersville in 1990, a giant tire fire kept firefighters busy for more than two weeks, sending plumes of smoke into the sky and costing taxpayers millions.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment said it’s reviewing feedback from the consultations to determine its next steps.

“To be clear, our government expects producers and producer responsibility organizations (PROs) to collect and manage all end-of-life tires as they become available,” said spokesperson Lindsay Davidson.

Meanwhile, the per-tire fee is expected to increase on August 1 to $6 a tire, said Moffatt.

“We’re hoping when those fees increase we’ll see increased collection. But there’s not a lot of indication of that. This is something the consumer needs to be aware of,” Moffatt said.