Famous quotations can often be not as accurately cited as they should be, and it turns out that the well known phrase “A week is a long time in politics”, famously attributed to Harold Wilson, doesn’t actually have a direct reference attached to it. My Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations tells me that it was thought to have been said at a lobby briefing during the 1964 sterling crisis. Given today’s Eurozone crisis and the volatility that is generating, it is a turn of phrase that may be more appropriate than ever.

In any case, it has stood the test of time as an expression of how quickly major events move. In our world of waste and resources, events don’t tend to have an impact in that kind of timescale, but it doesn’t mean that the week as a measure of time lacks significance.

Of course, I refer to the continually rumbling issue of weekly waste collections. It would appear that this interval of time takes on an almost religious significance for some when applied to the frequency of removal of residual rubbish from households. Now, I recognise that the seven-day week has a very long association with Christianity, but there isn’t an obvious seven-day cycle in nature from which this length of time as a measure could have been derived. It is a construct of humankind.

That got me thinking. Lots of people are getting exercised about weekly, or indeed fortnightly, collection of residual rubbish from homes. There is a degree of obsession with the week as a measure of time in relation to bin collection, regardless of natural cycles, resource efficiency or even logistics and economy.

Eric Pickles MP is the most prominent figure on this issue, but he clearly has support from a proportion of the population that subscribe to the Daily Mail worldview of things – and like it or not, this has to be taken seriously. At the recent LARAC Conference, ex-Mail journalist David Derbyshire told a packed audience of recycling officers about the massive response (by mail and online) that his former paper receives every time it runs a story about bins. Ignore it at your peril.

This is a serious issue, not least because Mr Pickles has remarkably managed to find £250 million from within his DCLG budget to run a fund to support reintroduction of weekly waste collections. This has caused great consternation amongst many in the waste and recycling world because of the cost attached to doing it and the questionable effect it will have on recycling rates. The popular call in the industry is for this money to be earmarked for the ramping up of weekly food waste collection for composting and AD treatment. Let’s hope that the many voices in support of this approach are heard by Mr Pickles as his department deliberates on how to allocate this fund.

But maybe there is another way of looking at this, and one or two ancient civilisations might have something to teach us. Both the Mayans and the Aztecs had ritual cycles of 260 days that were divided into 20 weeks of 13 days each, and both also divided the solar year of 365 days into 18 periods of 20 days each with five ‘nameless’ days. Not sure what they did with the nameless days, but perhaps that’s why they expired as civilisations.

Nearer to home, after the French Revolution our own near neighbours adopted a Revolutionary calendar which had a 10-day week known as a décade. Mind you, they only used it until the early 1800s – I wonder what names they gave to the extra three days?

So maybe the creative thing for local authorities to do is, rather than change the frequency of collection back to weekly, change the calendar to a longer week! I reckon the French 10-day week would be a half decent compromise position, and I am sure Mr Pickles will happily hand over the grant money for the printining of nice, new colourful calendars for the wheelie bins!