Tires are piling up behind London auto shops after province slashes recycling targets

It’s a less-than-beautiful sight outside the back doors of Hillman’s Auto Centre in London’s Southcrest neighbourhood. More than 100 used car tires are piled around a tree, damp from this week’s melted snow. 

Tire piles are growing across the province as some of the companies responsible for tire recycling have slowed or stopped processing tires following Ontario’s cuts to the industry’s recycling targets. 

Jamie Hillman, the owner of Hillman’s Auto Centre, said it’s been months since any of his tires were taken for recycling.

“It’s a good pile. There’s probably a good 100 to 150 tires here, and normally in the past, it never got that large,” he said. 

Since 2019, tire producers in Ontario have been responsible for recycling individually, and are required to meet annual collection targets for used tires. 

Many producers outsource that responsibility to “producer responsibility organizations” (PROs), who contract haulers and recyclers to collect and process those tires on the company's behalf. 

For years, tire producers were required to recycle 85 per cent of tires collected by weight, but in January 2025, that target dropped to 65 per cent.  

Since then, some auto shop owners say it feels as though there's less urgency from companies to pick up the recyclables.

“In the past two or three years since the Ontario program had come out, [recyclers] were showing up without any call at all. The drivers that were in town were told by their companies to swing by places of constant pickup,” said James Wands, who is a manager at Ron’s Quality Auto Centre.

“About a month ago, I was wondering what had happened. We hadn’t been getting any service at all, we hadn’t heard from anybody, we didn’t know where our pickup went,” Wands said.

Wands accumulated about 140 tires over five months before they were finally picked up on Wednesday.  

Both Wands and Hillman typically have their tires picked up by a not-for-profit PRO called eTracks. 

In an email to CBC News, a spokesperson said eTracks has never stopped managing recycling collection for producers, but confirmed there has been a backlog in pickups.

“As a not-for-profit, eTracks is not funded to collect more than what its producer customers are required to recycle and repurpose,” said eTracks vice president of communications and sustainability Melissa Carlaw.