Ontario's PCs eye off-road tire recycling fees

Thursday, March 28, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Tire recycling fees for off-road vehicles including tractors and combines are about to get a whole lot more expensive.

Progressive Conservative environment critic Michael Harris, the MPP for Kitchener-Conestoga, says Ontario Tire Stewardship, the organization responsible for recycling tires in Ontario, will introduce new fees April 1. He claims the fees could increase the cost of doing business by 2,200 per cent in some cases. The off-road category includes tires used for dump trucks, tractors and feller bunchers, a large forestry vehicle.

The fees are charged when people are buying the equipment, he says.

For example, the eco-fee for one front tire on a harvester-combine is going up to $352.80 from $15.29, he says.

Meanwhile Oxford MPP Ernie Hardeman, the Progressive Conservative’s agriculture critic, has launched a petition calling on the government to suspend the fee increases until an impact study is done and proposals to lower fees are implemented.

In a background document to his March 22 press release, Harris used these examples:

• John Deere 9300 tractor – new total fees  - $729.12; previous total fees - $61.16.
• John Deere 9770 combine – new total fees - $1,644.40; previous total fees - $91.74.
• Maxxum 110 tractor – new total fees - $423.36; previous total fees - $61.16.
• CAT 980 front-end loader – new total fees - $5,244.96; previous total fees - $417.

Harris blames the Liberal government for the fee hike, saying the fees are being introduced to pay for years of mismanagement at Ontario Tire Stewardship. He says the organization has run annual deficits to about $8 million on off-road tires since 2009 when the Liberal government created the program.

“Rather than address the fundamental flaws with the tire recycling program, the Liberals developed a Band-Aid solution charging OTS (Ontario Tire Stewardship) to develop a cost recovery model,” he says.

In a statement on its website about the new fees, Ontario Tire Stewardship says it continues to refine its practices to ensure Ontario’s tires are recycled efficiently and responsibly. “Part of this has included a review of our fee structure.”

The organization says fees for passenger and light truck tires will decrease to $5.69 per tire from $5.84 while off-road vehicle tires will have varying increases based on a tire’s weight. “In many cases the new off-road tire fees are still lower than the costs of tire disposal prior to the introduction of the used tire program in 2009.”

The new fees are designed to ensure that the true cost of tire recovery and recycling are reflected, the organization says. It also notes that during the past four years it has been meeting or exceeding its diversion targets with an average 95 per cent diversion.

Kate Jordan, Ontario Environment Ministry spokesperson, says by email Ontario Tire Stewardship is a private sector operation responsible for the safe recycling of used tires. It sets the fees for the tires. “The government does not set the fees nor receives any money collected from the fees,” she says.

Harris says the Liberal government approved the new fees through Waste Diversion Ontario, the oversight and implementation arm of the Liberal government’s waste diversion policies. The government directs Waste Diversion Ontario to oversee the Ontario Tire Stewardship, which operates the tire-recycling program, he explains.

It’s the environment minister who issued a regulation on Feb. 9, 2012 to Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO) to create a cost recovery model, Harris says. “OTS then develops the plan and submits it back to WDO for approval, which then in turn submits it to the (environment) minister for final sign off,” he notes.

For the ministry to claim it “has nothing to do with the operation and implementation of the government’s recycling program is truly laughable,” he says.

Harris says the Conservatives would eliminate Waste Diversion Ontario, bring “all of the oversight authority back into the (environment) ministry” and inject competition into the recycling marketplace. They’d implement a program for the environment ministry to set targets and monitor the outcomes but allow “the producers of the product to implement their own program” and that would drive down costs and improve environmental standards, he explains. BF