OFA acknowledges drop in tire recycling fees but says they're still too high

Monday, April 15, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture is reluctantly supporting the province’s tire recycling organization’s request for government approval to lower recently increased fees on agricultural tires but the fees are still too high, says president Mark Wales.

Ontario Tire Stewardship, which is responsible for the tire-recycling program and is made up of tire manufacturers and distributors, introduced a huge increase in recycling fees for agricultural tires starting April 1. The new fees are based on the weight of the off-road tires, including ones used for agricultural equipment, such as tractors and combines.
 
But after discussions with the federation the fees have been somewhat scaled back. Tires weighing 70 to 250 kilograms will now have a fee of $47.04 per tire, while the per tire fee for tires weighing more than 250 kilograms will be $182.28, down from the fee of $352.80 per tire introduced on April 1. Previously the fees were $15.29 per tire regardless of tire weight.

The federation launched a lobby campaign late last month through its new call-to-action website and urged members to contact their MPPs and Premier Kathleen Wynne to protest the increase.

The OTS “reports that 70 per cent of agricultural tires are under 250 kilograms,” Wales says in a press release. The revised fees will be retroactive to April 1.

OTS has to “make a request to the Minister of the Environment to change the fee structure again,” Wales says. “This fee structure that they’re asking for is much lower than the one that has been in effect since April 1.”

Wales says a number of government regulatory and legislative changes must be made so the fees can be lower than the revised fees being requested by OTS. Those changes include:

• Allowing tires to go for incineration both in and out of Ontario;
• Enabling recycled tires to be used for geo-tech uses, such as hillside stabilization and road construction; and
• Permitting tires to be used in landfills as covers for recently dumped garbage.

The Waste Diversion Act prohibits these options for tire recycling, which “means the places they (OTS) can send them (recycled tires) are sometimes a lot further away,” Wales says. “The further you have to truck a tire, even if you chip it first before you truck it, the more it costs.”

One of the other two things that must change is OTS should be permitted to collect back the HST it has to pay for the service it provides of getting recycled tires. “That adds $1 million a year just for the cost of recycling those tires,” he says. “It’s how the Waste Diversion Act is written that causes that to happen.”

The other is “there is paper debt for the last four years of about $27 million that the Act requires them to charge on fees going forward but that has to change,” he says.

Wales says he doesn’t know how much lower the fees would be because “it depends how many of these things that you can get put in place.”

Without more markets and changes to regulations to make the process less expensive, Wales says there won’t be a sustainable, lower fee in the long run. “If those regulatory and legislative changes don’t get made, then this system of collecting fees on tires will collapse by the end of the year.” BF