Supply and recovery of electronics in Ontario

Companies who supply electronics to Ontario, specifically information technology and telecommunications/audio-visual equipment, are obligated by law to meet resource recovery targets. Resource recovery is the collection and repair or recycling of end-of-life products or packaging.  Under the Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) Regulation, electronics producers must report every year on the amount of electronics they supply to Ontario, and how they met the resource recovery requirements.  

For more information about resource recovery and Ontario’s recycling laws, visit our information section on the circular economy.  

Reporting on electronics recovery

RPRA will report aggregated electronics supply and recovery data annually to this page, along with annual reductions applied to the recovery requirement for electronics.  

Types of data reported: 

• Supply: The amount of electronics supplied into the Ontario market. 
• Annual recovery requirement: The tonnes of electronics producers are required to recover. 
• Annual recovery requirement reduction: Reduction to the overall recovery requirement as determined by the amount of electronics supplied that were reported as having extended warranties, containing recycled component material, or being repairable. The reductions are calculated differently for each category.  

Published reports will not contain commercially sensitive information. 

The data on this page was finalized on October 26, 2023, and the data reported is subject to change. This page will be updated annually with the most accurate data RPRA has available to publish at the time.

Report timelines

The annual tonnes of material supplied into Ontario are reported to RPRA after a two-year lag, and the annual tonnes recovered are reported to RPRA after a one–year lag, as shown in the tables below.

Electronics supply

Electronics recovery

For more information about RPRA’s resource recovery reporting, and for reports on other regulated materials, visit our resource recovery reports webpage.

Producers of electronics began reporting their annual supply of electronics into Ontario to RPRA in 2021. To-date, RPRA has supply data from 2018 and 2019 (reported in 2021), 2020 (reported in 2022), and 2021 (reported in 2023).

Electronics recovered

Producers of electronics are required to report the tonnes of recovered electronics to RPRA annually. Recovering electronics means collecting end-of-life and/or discarded electronics and refurbishing them or breaking them down into their component parts or materials for recycling or reuse.

To-date, RPRA has data on the tonnes of electronic materials recovered in 2021 (reported in 2022) and 2022 (reported in 2023). 

Electronics recovered by stream

Under the EEE Regulation, producers must recover a certain amount of electronics each year based on the amount they supplied into Ontario. This is called the recovery requirement. 

In the graph opposite, ‘processed’ refers to tonnes of electronics that were broken down into parts or raw materials.

*remaining materials include: batteries, bulbs, mercury, rare earth metals and other

The quantity of electronic materials a producer is required to recover in a given year can be reduced by up to 50% if the electronics they supplied have extended warranties, contain post-consumer recycled material, or can be repaired and for which the producer made tools and instructions available.

This graph shows the annual tonnes reported as meeting these criteria. The recovery requirement reduction, which applies to the subsequent year’s recovery requirement, is different for each category:

• For extended warranties: the volume of EEE reported as having a warranty beyond one year, a 5% reduction in recovery requirement for each additional year.
• For recycled component material: equivalent reduction in recovery requirement for the volume of EEE reported as containing recycled material.
• For repairability: a 10% reduction in recovery requirement for the volume of EEE reported as repairable.

More details on how reductions are applied can be found in the EEE Verification and Audit Procedure.

The following electronics supply and recovery data is available for download. The data is labelled according to the year the data is from (not the year it was reported to RPRA. See the about resource recovery section for more information on the years data was reported to RPRA).

• Electronics supply and recovery from 2018-2022