OXFORDSHIRE throws out thousands of tonnes of waste each year, but not many people know exactly where that rubbish goes.

So to celebrate National Recycle Week, waste sites across the county threw open their doors and allowed inquisitive members of the public in.

We packed our noseplugs to discover just where the county’s food waste goes...

Covering three acres next to the A40, the Cassington Anaerobic Digestion Plant was launched in October last year.

Since then, the £9m plant has been digesting more than 100 tonnes of food waste every day.

All recycled food from homes in Oxford, the Vale of the White Horse, West Oxfordshire and South Oxfordshire comes here.

And in return, the plant chucks out enough electricity to power 4,200 homes and fertiliser for local farmers to spread over their fields.

Pamela Hawes, commercial manager for recycling company Agrivert, which runs the plant, said: “About 12 to 15 lorries come through here each day.”

The rubbish, which has a smell that hits you like a wave as you walk through the door, is poured into a bunker. It is then separated from contamination, homogenised, pasteurised and stored in a series of green tanks, visible from the A40.

In total, food spends 130 days being stirred and matured at different temperatures.

Commercial co-ordinator Debra Barnacle said: “The digesters are like big stomachs, there is a very fine balance of chemical reactions taking place in there. We can’t ever turn them off, because it would take days to get them running again.

“With the heavy snow last winter, we had to pour a lot of silage into the digesters to keep them going while there was no food. That works as a kind of Alka-Seltzer, keeping the stomachs happy.”

The plant is run 365 days a year, but incredibly there are only ever three members of staff on site.

Everything else is run by computers, which can be controlled remotely. And the outcome – 1,000 cubic metres of gas every hour, 2.1 mega watts of electricity and digestate, which is sold to local farmers as a chemical-free fertiliser.

Visitors seemed impressed with the technology, if not the smell.

Aliena Ratenazi was visiting Oxford from Johannesburg, researching technologies to take back home.

She said: “I’m part of a group trying to set up ways of recycling in South Africa. “It’s been very good finding out about it all, renewable energy is something we really need to look at.”

Others had come less far. Mike McKinley, from Steeple Aston, said: “I’m just interested in it all, so thought I’d come along to learn more.”