Connecticut Launches First Tire Stewardship Program

Connecticut is about to take a modest but historic step toward solving one of its more stubborn waste problems. Starting this Saturday, residents in Redding, Weston, Newtown and Canton can drop off old tires at their local transfer stations free of charge, marking the launch of what officials describe as the nation’s first tire stewardship program led by tire manufacturers.

The rollout is deliberately limited. Of the nearly 3.5 million tires Connecticut residents discard each year, most will still need to find another way to dispose of them while the program builds out. But organizers hope the four-town pilot demonstrates how the model can work before expanding statewide.

From those transfer stations, collected tires will move to one of five processors operating in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The processors will either resell usable tires or find ways to repurpose the material, keeping rubber out of landfills and off the roadsides where illegally dumped tires accumulate year after year.

The effort operates under a framework called extended producer responsibility, or EPR, which places the financial burden of disposal on the companies that make products in the first place rather than on consumers or local governments. Major manufacturers including Bridgestone, Continental, Michelin and Goodyear have already signed on. The program is administered by Connecticut Tire Stewardship, a nonprofit the tire industry established specifically to oversee it.

Jesse Schofield, the organization’s executive director, acknowledged the program is drawing on international experience while still figuring out what will work here. “There’s a lot of other tire EPR programs globally, and especially across Canada,” Schofield said. Programs elsewhere have sometimes been running since the 1990s, and Connecticut organizers are studying what those efforts got right and wrong. “We’re very much in the infancy of trying to set this up,” Schofield added, “and figure out some of these aspects that work for Connecticut, and the differences that we have.”

The logic behind EPR is straightforward. When people face fees to dispose of tires legally, a meaningful share of them skip it. Tires end up in vacant lots, along roadsides and in the woods, where they become both an eyesore and a public cost. Cleanup bills fall on municipalities and the state. By funding disposal through fees built into the price of new tires, the program eliminates the financial incentive to dump illegally.

Connecticut lawmakers laid the groundwork in 2023, passing legislation that required tire manufacturers to create their own stewardship organization, subject to oversight by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The law prohibited the program from charging consumers additional disposal fees. Manufacturers can recover their costs through fees embedded in new tire sales, but the disposal itself stays free at the point of collection.

The legislation did come with a notable gap. Retail stores handle the majority of tire disposal in Connecticut, but the law stopped short of requiring their participation in the program. That omission remains controversial and will likely shape how effectively the program can scale. A system designed to reduce illegal dumping needs accessible collection points, and for most people, the garage where they get new tires installed is the most convenient option.

For now, the four participating towns offer a proof of concept. If the transfer station model works smoothly and the processors can handle volume without bottlenecks, the program has a foundation to build from. Municipalities facing their own budget pressures have a clear incentive to join: fewer abandoned tires to clean up and no cost passed to residents.

Connecticut has a habit of moving cautiously on environmental policy, sometimes to its credit and sometimes to its frustration. The tire stewardship program fits that pattern. It took three years from the passage of the enabling legislation to get four towns into a pilot program. The scale is small. The structural question about retail participation is unresolved.

But the underlying model is sound, and the international experience suggests it can work. Connecticut is writing the first chapter of what could become a national template. How well it writes it will depend on whether the program can move from four towns to something that actually reaches the 3.5 million tires residents discard every year.