Ontario’s experience with tyre recycling has become an important case study in how changes to Extended Producer Responsibility regulations can have consequences across the end-of-life tyre supply chain.
Changes introduced at the beginning of 2025 were intended to simplify Ontario’s tyre management system, reduce administrative burden and give producers greater flexibility in meeting their obligations.
Less than two years later, used tyres were accumulating at tyre retailers, municipal waste facilities and collection sites across the Canadian province.
Some municipalities stopped accepting tyres altogether. The Ontario Tire Dealers Association estimated that more than one million end-of-life tyres had accumulated, while individual sites reported thousands of tyres awaiting collection.
Ontario has now changed the regulations again.
In September 2026, the provincial government increased the tyre management target from 65% to 80% and announced that the required collection network would expand from approximately 4,300 to 6,500 sites.
The government says the changes are intended to address existing backlogs and improve the reliability of tyre collection.
So what happened?
Ontario Changes Its Tyre Regulations
Ontario operates an Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, system that places responsibility for end-of-life tyres on the companies supplying tyres into the province.
Before 2025, the regulations contained two important performance requirements.
Producers generally had a collection requirement equivalent to 85% of the applicable historical tyre supply and a separate resource recovery requirement covering 85% of the tyres collected.
The system therefore created an obligation not only to process tyres, but also to collect a minimum quantity.
That changed on 1 January 2025.
Under revised regulations, the separate collection target was removed and replaced by a management requirement calculated against historical tyre supply.
For most tyres, the new target was set at 65% from 2025 to 2029, increasing to 70% from 2030.
The Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority, or RPRA, subsequently confirmed the practical difference: producers no longer had collection targets and were no longer required to collect a minimum weight of used tyres.
Importantly, tyres that were collected still had to be appropriately managed.
That distinction would become significant.
Why Change a System That Was Already Operating?
There was some logic behind Ontario’s decision.
The previous system was not achieving its collection target.
RPRA data shows Ontario had a 2024 collection requirement of 173,311 tonnes, but approximately 149,838 tonnes were actually collected, representing a collection rate of 73.49% against the 85% requirement.
The processing side performed considerably better. Approximately 135,028 tonnes were recovered, producing a recovery rate of 90.11% against the applicable recovery requirement.
Ontario therefore had a system that was falling short of its collection requirement but performing strongly at recovering tyres once they entered the system.
The provincial government said its reforms would reduce administrative burden, increase flexibility and better align tyre regulations with Ontario’s other producer responsibility programs.
Instead of calculating separate collection and recovery obligations, producers would have a single management target.
On paper, it was simpler.
The question was what incentive that structure created once the management target had been achieved.
What Happens Once the Target Has Been Reached?
Under the previous regulations, collecting a minimum quantity of tyres was itself part of the compliance obligation.
Under the revised system, producers needed to ensure sufficient tyres were reused, retreaded or processed to satisfy the new management requirement. For 2025, RPRA calculated that requirement at approximately 130,427 tonnes.
Tyres actually collected still needed to be managed. However, with no minimum collection-weight target, the regulatory requirement to keep bringing additional tyres into the system had changed.
Reports from Ontario’s tyre industry suggest the consequences became increasingly apparent during 2025.
The Ontario Tire Dealers Association said tyre dealers, workshops, municipal yards, recyclers and other collection sites began experiencing inadequate collections.
According to the association, one processor announced in August 2025 that it had reached or exceeded its processing target and began scaling down operations. Other organisations reportedly reached their targets later in the year and also reduced activity.
Those claims come from industry representatives rather than a government investigation, so they should not be treated as establishing a single cause for the backlog.
What is independently documented is that tyre collection problems subsequently emerged across multiple Ontario municipalities.
Tyres Begin to Accumulate
By early 2026, reports of tyre stockpiles were becoming difficult to dismiss as isolated incidents.
The Ontario Tire Dealers Association estimated in February that more than one million end-of-life tyres were stockpiled across the province. That figure has not been independently verified by Ontario authorities, but municipal evidence demonstrates that collection delays were occurring across multiple areas.
South Huron temporarily stopped accepting used tyres at its landfill in June 2026 after reaching its storage capacity. The municipality referred specifically to a growing province-wide tyre collection backlog following the January 2025 regulatory changes.
Wellington County temporarily stopped accepting tyres at its waste facilities from July, while Haldimand County followed as inventories increased and collections were delayed.
Peterborough reported approximately 8,000 to 9,000 scrap tyres at its waste management facility, compared with a normal inventory of around 3,000 to 4,000.
By September, Orillia was reportedly dealing with approximately 5,000 tyres at its waste facility.
The issue was no longer confined to tyre retailers or processors. Municipal waste systems were being affected.
A Smaller Required Collection Network
Another part of Ontario’s reforms involved the collection network itself.
The 2025 regulations provided producers with greater flexibility over where and how collection services were provided, including allowing some collection sites in adjacent municipalities and permitting a proportion of required sites to be replaced by collection events.
Industry sources claimed approximately 9,000 locations had previously participated in tyre collection.
Under the revised requirements, Ontario says approximately 4,300 collection sites are currently required.
The historical 9,000-site figure has not been confirmed through a directly comparable government dataset, so the two figures should be treated cautiously.
What is clear is that Ontario has now decided more collection points are required.
From January 2027, producers will be required to establish another 2,200 sites, increasing the required network to approximately 6,500 locations. At least 10% of those additional sites must be located in northern Ontario.
Ontario Changes Course
The provincial government began examining the collection problem during early 2026.
Between January and March, Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks met individually with all five tyre Producer Responsibility Organisations, tyre processors and an industry association to discuss collection disruptions.
A subsequent consultation attracted 81 submissions.
On 21 September 2026, Ontario announced another significant revision to the regulations.
The management target increased from 65% to 80%, applying from 2026 onwards.
Ontario explicitly connected the higher target with collection, saying the change would require producers and Producer Responsibility Organisations to collect more tyres.
The government also said the amendments were intended to reduce existing tyre backlogs and improve the reliability of collection services for communities and businesses.
Only 21 months after removing the separate collection target, Ontario has substantially increased the amount of tyre material producers are required to manage and is expanding the required collection network by more than 50%.
The Numbers Explain Part of the Problem
Ontario’s tyre supply data provides useful context.
RPRA recorded approximately 208,285 tonnes of tyres supplied into Ontario in 2022 and 208,118 tonnes in 2023.
The regulatory management requirement for 2025 was approximately 130,427 tonnes. Under the original 65% rules, the 2026 requirement would have been approximately 134,596 tonnes.
These figures should not be interpreted as meaning the difference automatically became waste.
Tyres remain on vehicles for several years, while replacement cycles vary according to vehicle type, kilometres travelled, tyre construction and operating conditions. This is why EPR systems generally calculate obligations using historical supply rather than simply comparing current-year tyre sales with current-year waste generation.
But the numbers demonstrate why the relationship between tyre supply, ELT generation and regulatory targets matters.
If the amount of material producers are required to manage falls significantly below the amount of ELT material actually entering the waste stream, it is possible for regulatory targets to be achieved while tyres remain elsewhere in the collection system.
That is an important distinction between meeting a regulatory target and ensuring the entire end-of-life tyre system is functioning effectively.
Why Ontario Matters to Australia
Ontario’s experience is relevant beyond Canada because it highlights a fundamental question for any tyre stewardship system: what exactly does the regulatory target incentivise participants to do?
A tyre does not become successfully managed simply because sufficient recycling capacity exists.
Tyres entering the replacement market eventually become end-of-life tyres. Those tyres need accessible collection points, reliable transport to processors, sufficient processing capacity and viable markets for the resulting materials.
Weakness in any one part of that chain can create problems elsewhere.
Ontario attempted to simplify its system by replacing separate collection and recovery obligations with a single management target while providing producers with greater flexibility over collection.
The available evidence shows tyre collection subsequently became increasingly unreliable. It would, however, be too simplistic to attribute every collection problem solely to the regulatory change. Processing capacity, transport economics, seasonal tyre replacement volumes and the structure of the collection network can also affect the movement of ELTs.
For Australia, where the structure and future direction of tyre stewardship continues to be debated, Ontario demonstrates why recycling or recovery percentages cannot necessarily tell the whole story.
A stewardship scheme also needs to consider whether tyres are being collected consistently, whether regional and remote generators have practical access to collection, whether processors have sufficient commercial incentive and capacity, and whether sustainable end markets exist for recovered material.
The Target Is Only One Part of the System
Perhaps the most significant part of Ontario’s experience is not that problems developed after the regulations changed.
It is what happened next.
Ontario increased the management requirement from 65% to 80%, added another 2,200 required collection sites and introduced additional measures covering collection-site removal, reporting and enforcement.
The province is effectively adjusting the system after observing how participants responded to the previous regulatory settings.
That makes Ontario a useful real-world case study for countries considering how producer responsibility should apply to tyres.
A successful EPR scheme cannot be measured only by how much material is recycled after it reaches a processor.
It also needs to ensure that the tyres waiting to enter that system actually get collected.
