Councils trial KAT to calculate kerbside recycling costs << Back to Main News Page Added: Wednesday, 14 July 2004 Twelve local councils have begun testing the kerbside analysis tool (KAT), designed to estimate the cost of proposed recycling programmes. The KAT has been developed by Eco Alternatives consultancy in collaboration with Waste Watch and provides a spreadsheet into which councils can enter information on kerbside schemes and calculate costs. The system allows for a variety of variables that can have significant impact on costs, such as number of houses, number of vehicles, collection frequency and distances travelled by collection vehicles. The major benefit of the KAT is that it allows local councils to enter locally specific data, overriding built in figures where costs are known to be higher or lower than the calculated average. The KAT system is being distributed to all local authorities free of charge by WRAP during July.