A FOOD recycling centre is being proposed to help Oxfordshire deal with its mounting waste crisis.

District councils say weekly household collections of food and kitchen waste could help usher in a new era of recycling in the county.

And they are pressing Oxfordshire County Council to invest in a modern recycling plant which would enable vast amounts of food to be safely turned into compost.

The districts say County Hall should oversee the creation of a £1m in-vessel composting plant as a priority. This technology involves putting food in vast closed containers known as vessels, and pumping air into them.

The resulting compost can be used as a soil improver in local parks, for example.

Such plants are already in use in Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Devon and Dorset.

Households across Oxfordshire are facing fortnightly rubbish collections as part of a new county-wide approach to reducing waste.

And it has now emerged that districts will be demanding weekly food collections and recycling as the price for backing the new Oxfordshire Joint Municipal Strategy.

The strategy has taken more than two years to negotiate and includes a whole array of policies designed to reduce waste from homes, in order to avoid crippling Government fines.

In the face of mounting public concern, the introduction of fortnightly collections has become one of the most contentious issues.

But the districts say householders' worries can be overcome if kitchen and food waste was separated from general household waste and collected weekly.

West Oxfordshire's Cabinet on Wednesday voted to introduce fortnightly rubbish collections, with weekly food waste collections as an important rider. Oxford City Council may follow a similar course on Monday.

The city council has told County Hall that recycling food would divert significant amounts of waste from landfill and give householders the chance to recycle more.

The council's business manager Philip Dunsdon said: "This is an area of development that would be particularly attractive to most of the districts and would allow the collection of kitchen waste from households either as a stand alone service or combined with garden waste collections."

Chris Cousins for Oxfordshire County Council, said: "The idea of food recycling is definitely on the agenda. In-vessel composting is one of the things under active consideration."

But it appears the county would hope that a commercial operator would be prepared to foot the bill for any food treatment centre.

It is unlikely that food recycling could be fully introduced across the county for another two years, with some of the district councils having to wait until contracts with waste collection companies end.

Somerset opened its £1m in-vessel composting system last year after it was found that 28 per cent of household waste involved food. But Oxfordshire county council will make clear that even food recycling may not be enough to reduce quantities of waste being sent to landfill, to avoid big fines. It is still not ruling out the possibility of incinerators having to be built to burn waste.