The Ontario government is seeking to limit the amount of money scavengers can collect returning liquor and wine bottles bought before the beginning of the province's new recycling program, but admits there's no way to stop it completely.

Starting Monday, customers were charged a recycling fee of 10 cents or 20 cents a bottle for liquor or wine purchases. The money is returned when the empties are brought to a Beer Store.

However, nothing prevents people from returning bottles bought before Monday and claiming a deposit they never paid.

Public Infrastructure Renewal Minister David Caplan said the government is not worried about the loophole allowing people to rip off the system.

But the government has passed a regulation to try to decrease such fraud by limiting returns to 120 bottles at a time.

"At that rate if you think about it 10 cents a bottle is about 12 bucks or 20 cents is about 24 bucks so it's really not economically feasible for someone to want to engage in that," Caplan said.

Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory called the deposit-return system inconvenient because the bottles must be returned to Beer Stores, not the Liquor Control Board of Ontario stores where they were purchased.

"This is a half-baked scheme that was rushed together without a thought to the impact it will have on consumers," Tory said in a press release.

Caplan defended the program, saying 70 per cent of Beer Stores are within a kilometre of a liquor store.