Peak oil presents the world with an energy crisis once supplies start to dwindle any time from 2015. But another growing crisis is looming, with potentially devastating consequences for the world's food supply.

Phosphorous is an essential nutrient for plant growth, along with nitrogen and potassium. It is a key component in DNA and plays an essential role in plant energy metabolism. Without it, crops would fail, causing the human food chain to collapse.

Phosphate production is predicted to peak around 2030 as the global population expands to a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050. And unlike oil, where there are renewable energy alternatives to fossil fuels, there is no substitute for phosphorus, according to the US Geological Survey.

As imported rock phosphate becomes more expensive and may one day run out, there could be a solution much closer to home, says Professor Brian Chambers, a leading UK soil scientist.

Professor Chambers is calling on the government to respond to the threat of peak phosphate by recovering nutrients from household compost, livestock and human manure and municipal waste.

Western Europe imports all of its phosphate for agricultural use, but Professor Chambers from environmental consultancy ADAS, believes that more than 50 per cent of the UK's total requirement could come from organic sources, saving the agricultural industry between £20m and £30m a year.

"People often talk about human's addiction to oil. We've got exactly the same addiction to phosphate fertilisers too," he said.

"Our primary source – rock phosphate – is mined for use in fertilisers and that's expected to peak around 2030. It means that right at the time we need to be doubling our food-growing capacity to feed the rising global population, we'll be starting to run out of phosphorus. It's a nightmare scenario."

The solution could lie in recovering phosphate from organic waste that currently ends up being sent to landfill. The UK produces about 100 million tonnes of organic waste each year, which could generate up to seven per cent of the UK's renewable energy by 2020, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The coalition government has already pledged to lead the UK towards a zero-waste economy, and a development programme of anaerobic digestion (AD) plants is a major step in that direction. There are currently 37 AD plants in the UK, with another 60 either under construction or at the planning stage.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change and Defra last week began a consultation exercise with industry designed to help accelerate the roll out of AD systems.

AD plants not only generate energy while helping to reduce emissions and landfill waste, but they also produce "digestate" once the fuel has been burned, which is high in nutrients and can be used as organic fertiliser.

Chambers is now urging the government to stimulate rapid investment in technologies such as AD plants that will enable phosphates to be reused in agriculture, rather than sending a finite resource into landfill.

In a closed-loop nutrient recycling process, food waste would be brought to an AD plant and heat treated to pasteurise it, killing off any pathogens. It would then be biologically digested, a process that would also give off biogas for energy, before being stabilised into a liquid "digestate" which could be spread over arable and grasslands.

"But we're not doing it on grand enough scales – the technology and understanding is advanced enough to increase phosphate recycling," said Chambers. "The longer infrastructure development is deferred and regulations suppress uptake – a real possibility in straitened economic times – the quicker we will consume our finite phosphate fertiliser supplies."