Toronto is asking the province to offset the cost of Ontario's new bottle deposit program, which is expected to take millions of dollars a year out of the city's coffers.

Residents have taken to the LCBO bottle deposit initiative since it began in February, which means more bottles are being returned to Beer stores and fewer are ending up in curbside blue boxes.

The lack of liquor and wine bottles means Toronto has less content to sell to the glass market. It also means the same number of crews and trucks being used to pick up blue bins even though there is less content, which will likely increase the cost per tonne of processing blue boxes.

Geoff Rathbone, the acting general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, said in just two months there has already been a 50-to-80 per cent drop in the amount of glass tonnage collected by the city.

"We estimate, in a worst-case scenario, we would lose about a million dollars revenue a year, because the LCBO is not using our blue box anymore," said works committee chairman Glenn de Baeremaeker. "They used to pay us a fee to use their blue box."

The province's bottle recycling program was created to reduce the amount of bottles ending up at landfills.

Toronto is trying to become the greenest city in North America, so councillors realize the loss of dollars through the recycling strategy is an unfortunate scenario.

"If people have a deposit return system and take bottles back to the store instead of (putting it in) the blue box, we get less money for the blue box, but that's the cost of doing business, that's the cost of doing the right thing, ecologically," said Councillor De Baeremaeker.

Mayor David Miller is going a step further and asking the province pay for the entire blue recycling program, which would save Toronto between $5 and $8 million per year, CTV's Desmond Brown reported.

A city document obtained by the Canadian Press also officials expect revenues to take a hit from scavengers who have more material to illegally pluck out of the blue bins.

"No . . . savings are expected from less LCBO containers in the waste stream," reads a briefing note prepared last month by Toronto's Solid Waste Management Services division.

"There will also be lost revenue from the removal of aluminum, PET (clear plastic) and gable-top (paper with plastic screw top) LCBO containers."

Officials say they will have a better idea of the financial impact of Toronto in a few months.

The cost to municipalities throughout Ontario is not yet known.

With a report from CTV's Desmond Brown and files from The Canadian Press