A Glimpse at Tire EPR in North America

About 280 million tires are discarded in the U.S. each year and a good share of them are illegally dumped, posing risk for soil contamination, fires and mosquito-borne illness, and strapping governments with enormous clean up expenses.

In response, a few U.S. states and several Canadian provinces have followed Europe’s lead by enacting or introducing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws holding tire producers responsible for the cost and management of end-of-life tires (EOL).

The Product Stewardship Institute and Northeast Recycling Council hosted a webinar in April 2024 where presenters told their regions’ EPR stories—their successes, challenges, what was included in their plans and why. And they elaborated on end markets for tire scraps.

Insight came from Suna Bayrakal, Product Stewardship Institute; Tom Metzner, Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection; Steve Meldrum, eTracks Tire Management Systems; and Barry Takallou, Crumb Rubber Manufacturers (CRM).

In 2023 Connecticut became the first U.S. state to pass a tire EPR law. Virginia and Vermont introduced laws in 2024. And over 20 European countries have developed similar regulations to ensure these mass-produced, hard-to-manage materials are collected and recycled once they’re spent.

“If you Google illegal dumping and fill in different states I think you would find every state in the country has a problem with illegal dumping. And it’s costing governments time and money because the root cause [of this behavior] is not being addressed,” Metzner says.

“The solution is not law enforcement; it’s eliminating the incentive for dumping, which is tire disposal fees,” he says.

Connecticut traveled a long, rocky road to get EPR passed as a funding and regulatory mechanism, largely because the tire manufacturing industry fought it. This past January, just over eight years after the start of that journey, industry came to the table for the first stakeholder dialogue, and a consultant they hired has expressed intent to form a stewardship organization, which develops plans to recover materials approved by the state.

Entities who can opt to tap into collection free of charge include permitted transfer stations, tire retailers, car dealerships, auto garages, and fleet maintenance garages.

Metzner advises states thinking about developing tire EPR regulations to include provisions such as requiring brand owners to submit clearly laid out plans, which include details of how they will be implemented; requiring producers to file annual reports to document how the plan is working; requiring that tires are tracked and sent to the appropriate markets; and setting up the program to be solely financed through producer funding.

In addition to these stipulations, in Connecticut all tires must be recycled or resold. EPR includes a public education component. And there are well-defined performance goals, with mitigating illegal dumping being a key goal.

eTracks Tire Management Systems is a producer responsibility organization that supports Canadian producers with EPR compliance. Its core functions are to establish and operate collection systems; ensure  tires are treaded, recycled, and reused; and see that producers meet their targets.

The nonprofit operation manages about 13 million passenger tire equivalents annually, and eTracks CEO Steve Meldrum says there are robust end markets for the materials.

Tire recycling programs tend to fall under one of several frameworks.  There are government-run programs that impose taxes or fees to subsidize programs. There is traditional EPR where responsibility to collect and recycle falls on producers collectively as an industry, with incentives provided to haulers and processors. A third model is known as individual producer responsibility, where every individual producer has targets to collect and manage tires based on their previous years’ sales.

For the most part, Canada has gone beyond EPR to individual producer responsibility, Meldrum says.

He touched on a few key items to weigh in on when developing programs.

“Consider what tires will be included. If you are building infrastructure for end markets, if only one jurisdiction is working with a particular tire type there won’t be much inflow of material to market, so this is an important consideration,” he says.

As important is thinking through who is a producer or steward. In Canada it’s the retailer, but stewards could be brand holders, automakers, or importers, among entities.

Meldrum focused on performance metrics to gauge how producers are doing against their objectives. He emphasized the importance of harmonizing metrics across jurisdictions and recommended homing in on details such as the rate of illegal dumping, annual diversion rates, lifetime diversion rates, and changes over time in public awareness.

Determine acceptable end markets, too, whether tire-derived fuel, sports field infill, rubber modified asphalt, or other.

“If you want to move toward higher-use products then you can specify percentages of a particular end use you are looking to transition to,” Meldrum says.

Retreading is among the highest end uses, with potential to save 15 gallons of oil and 14 pounds of material, while keeping materials in circulation, Bayrakal noted.

 Along with retread, reuse and recycled rubber for tire manufacturing are at the top of the hierarchy and monofill, incineration, and landfill are at the bottom.

For CRM, who recycles about 30 million tires a year across the U.S. and Canada, key markets are rubber modified asphalt pavement, synthetic turf, and rubber molded products.

“I would look into the use of rubber in asphalt as an end market in particular because it is a vast market,” says Barry Takallou, president and CEO, CRM.

The U.S. produces about 450 million tons of hot mix asphalt for road systems. With close to 280 million tires retired annually, modifying 25 percent of asphalt with recycled material can provide a market for all of the country’s end of life tires, he says.

A main attribute is that rubber is not temperature sensitive so adding the material to pavement enables adaptability to temperature extremes, extending roads’ life, lowering maintenance costs, and ultimately saving taxpayers money while managing scrap tires, Takallou says.

EPR regulations typically call for tracking resource recovery rates and the fate of those recovered tires.  

eTracks developed a system in Ontario that for instance tracks rubber by tonnage down to the batch, from where it goes, to which hauler delivered it, and how much material went into what application.

What might future markets look like as policies emerge to keep tires out of landfill and in circulation?

One product that major tire manufacturers in Europe and some in North America are beginning to invest in is recycled carbon black, which is added as a filler in new tires.

But incorporating used tires as input into new tires is tricky, Meldrum says, adding, “It’s not a near-term solution [at large scale]. But it is certainly a mid- and longer-term end market that will be coming.”