Ontario to make companies, importers pay for disposal of old tires

A provincial agency is recommending Ontario scrap the $5 per tire ''disposal'' fee charged to drivers when they get rid of their old tires, and replace it with a levy charged to manufacturers and importers that they could pass on to consumers.

The fees paid by the tire producers would be used to fund the Ontario Tire Stewardship, an industry-administered plan to track, collect, store, transport, process and market scrap tires with a goal of having 95 per cent of them recycled in the province.

Currently, about half of the 12 million used tires generated in Ontario each year are sent to the United States or Quebec to be incinerated.

Waste Diversion Ontario, which includes representatives of industry as well as local governments and the public, predicts that number will grow to 15 million used tires annually by 2014, and has developed a new strategy to deal with the problem.

''The entire tire management system is driven by the lowest-cost option,'' executive director Glenda Gies said in an interview.

''We're going to create the payment system that rewards the folks who are registered as legitimate service providers, and will pay them when they do the right thing, which is deliver the tires to a processor in Ontario.''

Under Ontario's current system, residents and businesses pay retailers a fee that averages $5 a tire to manage the used tires that are removed.

Each time tires move from one party to the next _ from the retailer to waste management companies to the haulers to the recyclers or landfill operators _ costs are charged for each service.

The ''inherent flaw'' in the system is that choices made by each player are based on lowest costs, not the environment, so Ontario tires end up in kilns in Quebec or the U.S. that burn them for fuel, leaving the province's processors short of used tires to be turned into other products, Gies said.

''We'd like to set up a system where those tires are actually staying in Ontario and are feeding Ontario processors and manufacturers,'' she said.

''By setting up a system in which Ontario Tire Stewardship would be responsible for tracking all of the tires and for providing incentives to build Ontario's processing and manufacturing capacity, we're hoping to build some green industry in Ontario.''

The New Democrats said the Liberal government has a weak record of meeting its waste diversion goals, but welcomed the plan to have the industry pay fees and administer the used tire program in Ontario.

''In practical terms, if industry isn't paying for it, they won't care about how they design the tire or whether it's set up to be more easily recycled or less easily recycled,'' said NDP environment critic Peter Tabuns.

''To promote recycling, they should have to pay the fee.''

There are an estimated 2.3 million scrap tires in 95 stockpiles across Ontario, including six sites with more than 100,000 tires each, and Waste Diversion Ontario wants to eliminate all of them if possible by 2012.

''Sometimes putting them in a field is just an easier, cheaper option than delivering them to the appropriate processor,'' Gies said.

''By having a system where (the tire industry) would be responsible for paying the haulers and paying the processors, we're hoping that we're going to be able to eliminate that financial incentive to stockpile.''

Waste Diversion Ontario wants each site to have its own abatement plan with an eye to cleaning up and sorting tires for recycling and processing into other products, or as a last resort, using them for what the government calls ''tire-derived fuel.''

The plans to deal with the tire dumps would be worked out with the Environment Ministry and local municipalities.

The new fees that will be charged to manufacturers and importers could be added to the wholesale or retail price, or be passed along as a separate visible fee added to the price of a tire.

Currently, millions of tires in Ontario each year are turned into crumbs for rubberized asphalt, become alternatives to aggregate and sand for civil engineering projects, or are made into fabricated products such as hoses used in car engines.

Another 750,000 tires end up in Ontario landfills each year. Waste Diversion Ontario suspects 800,000 more are not accounted for because they are being dumped illegally.

The public has until Feb. 27, 2009, to comment on the group's plan to recover and recycle used tires, and clear out the stockpiles of millions of old tires scattered across the province.