Temporary Reprieve For Ontario’s Scrap Tire Program

A Provincial budget impasse has left Ontario’s tire recycling program intact, for now.

With Ontario’s political parties at odds over the pending provincial budget, Ontario’s prime minister Kathleen Wynne failed to get the support needed for passage and called for new provincial parliamentary elections in June.

Failure to pass the budget put a hold on all unfinished legislative business before the Ontario Parliament, including the rewrite of Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act and proposed Bill 91, known as the Waste Reduction Act.

Proposed in June 2013 by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Bill 91 would have mandated Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) requirements for the collection and recycling of all end-of-life products in Ontario, including tires.

The bill would have converted Waste Reduction Ontario, the government corporation created by the previously enacted Waste Reduction Act, to a new Waste Reduction Authority with responsibility to enforce compliance with the IPR program and levy fines and penalties.

As proposed, Bill 91 would put an end to Ontario Tire Stewardship (OTS), the province’s industry run scrap tire management program. Among other things, Bill 91 called for significant changes to the OTS funding structure. OTS currently funds it programs through a graduated scale of fees on new tire purchases. The IPR program would have been funded through fees and penalties to be determined later, according to Glenn Maidment, president of the Rubber Association of Canada. The IPR program would have been phased in during 2016 and 2017.

“For now OTS remains unchanged,” Maidment said.

While the election is a delay, it will allow Ontario’s tire industry to have more input in a new law’s provisions, he said. It gives the tire industry as well as the other affected industries time to present ideas for a better diversion program.

In other Ontario scrap tire news, OTS lowered its fee on passenger and light truck tire purchases to $5.43 per tire from the previous $5.69.

This is the second time OTS has issued a fee decrease on passenger and light truck tires, the organization said. When OTS was founded in 2009, the fee on those tires was $5.84. All other tire fees remain as before, OTS said.

OTS also announced that effective July 1, 2014, OTS will be requiring all tire collectors to report used tire volumes to OTS by fully and accurately completing quarterly filings as outlined in the Collector Guidebook. OTS will also host a series of refresher webinars for Collectors looking to “brush-up” on the mechanics of reporting.

© Scrap Tire News, June 2014