STUDENTS at Oxford Brookes University have designed and built a composting toilet.

The five students spent spare weekends and evenings designing and making the facility, which has now been opened in Pullens Lane Allotments, in Headington.

Architecture student Andy Edwards, 26, from Old Botley, applied for a grant of £500 from Brookes’s Student Community Fund while the St Clement’s and District Allotment Association provided the rest of the £2,200 build cost.

Mr Edwards said: “The group had written a brief of all the community facilities they had a wish-list for.

“We ran a brainstorming workshop with them and threw around a lot of ideas about the designs and what their priorities were.

“It became clear a compost toilet was at the bottom of their list because it would have cost around £9,000. We knew we could do it for a lot less if we built it from scratch.”

Mr Edwards and fellow architecture student Sophie Morley ran a series of workshops with Brookes students on bricklaying, timber framing, joinery and other techniques used in the building.

Because the students had to fit the work in around their studies, it took them months to complete about two weeks’ labour.

Mr Edwards said: “We were bricklaying in snow in December, then we had sleet and hail and rain in January. We weren’t able to call it off when the weather was bad because we had limited time to do it.”

It is planned for students to continue to work with the allotment association on providing other facilities on the site.

Mr Edwards said: “It is something you generally don’t get to do, working with real clients and building real things with a genuine agenda.”

Composting toilets work by compacting human waste in an aerobic, or oxygenated environment, until they become nutrient-rich fertiliser.

After using the toilet, people put a scoop of sawdust into the composting chamber beneath. No water is used in the process. Mr Edwards admitted he hadn’t tried out the facilities as yet, but said: “I’m told it is a very relaxing experience, you can hear the birds singing.”

He said he hoped compost toilets would take off at other allotment sites and the attractive construction would take away the mindset that they were unhygienic or smelly.

Marie Power, secretary of the allotment association, said: “Not only is it functional, it’s also beautiful.

“We certainly wouldn’t have got one for a number of years had they not taken the initiative.”