House lawmakers on Wednesday voted to require the participation of retail stores in Connecticut’s first-in-the-nation tire stewardship program, following years of pushback from local businesses. The program — which launched in four Connecticut towns last month — allows residents to dispos e of used tires for free at certain locations, such as a participating transfer station. It is funded entirely by tire manufacturers, who can pass along the cost through the price of new tires. But in order to ensure wider access to the program, proponents have long argued they need the participation of retail stores, where the majority of use tires are dropped off for disposal. While the legislation creating the stewardship program in 2023 gave retailers the option of participating in the program, so far none have signed up. This year’s legislation, House Bill 5157, would give retailers until July 1, 2027 to formally join the stewardship program. The House voted 124-21 in favor of the bill Wednesday, sending it to the Senate. State Rep. Joe Gresko, D-Stratford, described the bill as the final step toward solving a problem that arose when the state stopped tracking disposal fees for old tires in 1997. “It’s been the Wild West out there,” Gresko said. “You could pay $5 a tire, you could pay $20 a tire.” Critics said the old system — under which customers paid the fees to dispose their tires — only incentivized illegal dumping. Additionally, Gresko and others said some retailers were simply pocketing the fees and not properly disposing the tires. Like most states, Connecticut bans their disposal in landfills. The stewardship program is designed to fix that problem by collecting money to pay for disposal options when a customer buys a new set of tires, thus eliminating the incentive to avoid additional fees when they’re ready to throw the tires away. “This legislation fills a key gap in Connecticut’s tire stewardship program by bringing retailers into a system designed to manage end-of-life tires responsibly,” Jesse Schofield, the executive director of Connecticut Tire Stewardship, said in a statement Wednesday. “Retailer participation will strengthen the program already in place, making it easier for residents to recycle tires while supporting cleaner communities across the state.” Tire retailers, meanwhile, oppose being forced to join the manufacturer-led program, which they said would interfere with existing recycling efforts paid for through their own disposal fees. Participants in the stewardship program are prohibited from collecting such fees. But after efforts to broker a comprise fell apart during last year’s legislative session, Gresko said he was contacted by retail industry leaders saying they were ready to negotiate. “It’s going to happen,” Michael Barbaro, the president of Town Fair Tire, told the Connecticut Mirror in March. “By delaying this [until 2027] we would like to have a voice at the table on how the program works.” Gresko said one provision that still needs to be worked out between the manufacturers and the retailers is whether the cost of disposal — about $2 for a standard car tire — would still be included in the sticker price or be broken out as a separate fee at the point of sale. In addition, he said there’s concern that some large multistate retailers, like Town Fair Tire, could be end up being charged fees for tires that only pass through Connecticut before being sold in other states. While the bill passed the House with bipartisan support on Wednesday, the underlying stewardship program has faced criticism from some Republicans who say it merely shifts costs onto small businesses and their customers. While acknowledging that illegal dumping is an issue, they say it’s unlikely to be curbed through bureaucratic programs. House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, called the stewardship program a “disaster” that he compared to ongoing issues with the state’s bottle redemption efforts. In addition, Candelora said he’s concerned the program could prompt Town Fair Tire to close a major warehouse in his district that employs more than 350 people. “They passed a tire stewardship bill that doesn’t work for the industry,” Candelora said. “So now we’ve got to go back at it and try to fix it before we see catastrophic loss in that industry.” Neither the bill nor the stewardship program directly addresses what is currently the most common path for discarded tires in Connecticut: being shipped to Maine to be burned in pulp-and-paper mills. That outcome has attracted criticism, particularly in Maine, for its release of toxic pollutants. But without it, Gresko said there little infrastructure in place to deal with the nearly 3.5 million tires that are discarded by residents each year. In the long term, Gresko and other proponents of the stewardship program say their hope is that it will help attract new businesses to the state that can recycle tires into useful materials such as crumb rubber, Jersey barriers, or asphalt. ...read more read less