More than a year after a remaking of Ontario’s scrap tire handling rules thrust shops, haulers and municipalities into a growing scrap tire crisis, the provincial government has introduced new rules it says will address the issue.

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, generates an estimatd 12 million scrap tires annually. Ontario drivers pay a recycling fee for each new tire purchase. That fee is intended to cover the cost of collection and recycling. Under the quotas reduced from 85% to 80% in January 2025, that system broke down. PROs hit their quotas early and effectively stopped collection activities mid-2025. Other unrelated recycling capacity issues exacerbated the issue.

As a result, tires starting piling up at collection sites across the province, eventually spilling over into illegal dumping.

Among the new rules introduced by Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP), Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) who are ultimately responsible for organizing the collection of tires through contracted haulers, will have their quota raised from 65% of annual sales by weight introduced in January 2025, to 80%.

The new target applies to 2026 and each year after with the ministry reporting that many submissions in its consultations stated that increasing the target was the most direct way to address current tire collection disruptions.

This is a significant increase, amounting to an increase of an estimated 1.8 million tires, but still less than the 85% quota that was in place before the previous set of rule changes threw to sector into disarray and left perhaps more than a million tires uncollected to date.

The new rules also move to expand the number of collection sites. PROs must continue to meet the existing geographic distribution requirements for the current requirement of about 4,300 sites and must establish an additional 2,200 sites across Ontario. The province requires that 10 percent of these additional sites must be located in northern Ontario. This change will ensure more sites that generate used tires get collection service from PROs, says the province.

While touting the increase, the increased total of 6,500 collection sites to be served is still significantly below the 10,000 sites that the Ontario Tire Dealers Association says had been served before the January 2025 amendments took hold.

Also included in the amended regulations:

New rules beginning in 2027 that limit when PROs can remove or replace collection sites from their reported networks.

New requirements governing shared collection sites and how PROs can account for managed tires through agreements with other PROs.

Greater financial reporting and transparency requirements from PROs.

Removal of the $1-million cap on administrative penalties under Ontario’s producer responsibility regulations.

While the provincial ministry states in the newly revised rules that they will “help address existing backlogs” the new changes do not appear to directly address the massive stockpiles of scrap tires that currently exist at shops, municipal transfer stations – many are at capacity and have been refusing scrap tires for some months — landfills, and also at random, illegal dumping locations across the province.

That number is now estimated to be more than one million tires left uncollected, though the precise number isn’t readily known.

Also unknown is just how long it will take for activities to ramp up to meet the new targets and the OTDA is advising its members not to expect immediate changes to the level of service or activity they are seeing on the scrap tire front.

So, while many welcome the progress indicated with the change, significant questions remain about how implementation will go, and whether the changes will be enough to reinstate confidence in the scrap tire handling system in the province.

This is an evolving issue. Indie Garage and its parent organization CHAT Integrated Media will continue to monitor and update aftermarket professionals on an ongoing basis.