Buying tires for anything other than a passenger vehicle or pickup truck costs Ontarians more as of today.
But for farmers, the increase in tire recycling eco-fees can mean hundreds of dollars that wouldn’t have been paid had the tires been bought as recently as last weekend.
Tire stewardship eco-fees are designed to ensure tires aren’t simply thrown aside once they’ve reached the end of their useful life.
In exchange for paying the fee at the time of purchase, tire owners are able to recycle their old and unwanted tires.
Those who use the tires and pay the fees say they understand where the idea comes from.
“It keeps our environment cleaned up,” says Eric Brubacher of OK Tire in Elmira.
What has them less amused is the sudden and significant change in eco-fees. In one case, the fee for recycling a large tractor tire in Ontario rose from about $15 to $117.
The fees are now based on the size of the tire, meaning the biggest tires of all – like those on large combines – now have eco-fees of over $300 per tire.
“When you are talking the size of equipment and the number of tires on pieces of equipment, it’s a significant cost to the farmer,” says Carson Brown of Elmira-based Stoltz Farm Equipment.
On a large tractor, that could mean as much as $3,000 in eco-fees to replace each tire.
That’s costly enough that Glen Merrick says he expects some farmers to head outside Ontario’s borders to purchase tires free of the large eco-fee – and he may even do it himself.
“If you need two combine tires, it would pay to go to Quebec to buy them. They’re the same tires,” he says.
In the same set of changes, eco-fees for tires for cars and light trucks fell by 15 cents.
The province says the changes are designed to better reflect the actual cost of disposing of the tire.
