Provincial Attitudes

TREADING CAREFULLY. TRC primarily makes rubber mats for trailers, gyms and rinks as well as rubber sidewalk blocks. The southern Manitoba tire recycling plant last year reprocessed 1 million tires. TRC also began collecting and reprocessing highway trailer and tractor treads in addition to passenger car tires last year.

Throughout the past five years, the company’s workforce has declined—mainly through attrition—from 45 to 25, and Courteau has found that he can do more with fewer people on staff.

Despite fewer workers, production at the plant has doubled during the past year. The difference seems to have been an outpouring of employee-generated innovations that has greatly increased the efficiency of the operation, according to Courteau.

He notes that the provincial levy accounts for 86 percent of the cost of collecting the tires. The program was under-funded, he says.

As a result of the government’s decision, industry now has to determine how to fund tire recycling in Manitoba. Courteau estimates that it will take at least three months to put a new board together and three more months to figure out from where the funding is coming.

"By July 1, we may have some answers," he says. "That’s warp speed compared to the rate the government moved on this matter over the past five or six years."

The government is providing some interim funding, Courteau notes, but comments that $500,000 is inadequate. "It won’t last until July 1," he says.

"We don’t want to be whiners or complainers, but it is not logical to invest $5 million if you’re not going to be able to make a profit," Courteau comments.

WESTERN ROUNDUP. Government support across the rest of Canada for tire recycling varies depending on the province. While the levy in Manitoba is $2.80 per tire, Alberta—to the west of Manitoba—charges consumers a levy of $4 per tire.

"It’s certainly a challenging business," says Allan Champagne of Champagne Editions Inc., one of Alberta’s two major tire recyclers. "It’s a challenge collecting the tires and also finding markets for our new products."

The 14-year-old company, which is based in northern Alberta, collects tires from throughout Alberta and the Yukon Territory to the north. "We have between 1 million and 1.5 million tires in our possession at any given time," Champagne says.

The company’s manufactured products include industrial, dairy and anti-fatigue mats; rubber bricks; tiles for around pools, hot tubs and decks; sidewalk blocks; and livestock, horse and pet mattresses. "We do a lot of custom work," Champagne comments. "We are one of the largest manufacturers of finished recycled rubber products in North America."

Champagne Editions, which employs 100 full-time and up to 50 part-time staff, is currently undergoing an $8 million to $10 million plant upgrade. Work began in late 2004 and, Champagne says, should be completed in another couple of years.

"We are installing more equipment for our customizing lines," Champagne says. "Our goal is to have a state-of-the-art recycling plant."

The province of Saskatchewan—which is sandwiched between Manitoba and Alberta—has the ideal tire recycling program, Courteau says.

Because Saskatchewan is relatively new to tire recycling as a province, Courteau notes, the province was able to build on and improve upon models adopted by other provinces.

Saskatchewan’s levy is $3.50 per passenger tire, $5 for light truck tires, $35 for off-road vehicle tires and $10 for agricultural equipment tires. In 2004, 35 million pounds of tire rubber were reprocessed in the province of about 1 million people, says Teresa McQuoid, the executive director of the Saskatchewan Scrap Tire Corp. (SSTC), which was formed in 1998. The province has two processors and a handful of small manufacturers who reuse the rubber.

The SSTC is also phasing tires out of Saskatchewan landfills. ‘Since 1999, we have cleaned up over 150 municipal landfill sites," McQuoid says. There are still another 150 to go. The speed of the cleanup depends on available funding.

The largest tire recycler in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, is a company called Western Rubber. The company has a capacity of 3 million tires a year and produces and sells crumb rubber for football fields and running tracks. Management declined to be interviewed for this article.

EASTERN DILEMMAS. In Canada’s Maritime Provinces on the East Coast, the major tire recycler is Tire Recycling Atlantic Canada Corp. (TRACC) in the province of New Brunswick.