commingle(d) = 'stuff to recycle'

[Mark Mandel]

For a number of years Philadelphia has provided curbside pickup of
recyclable materials. In the past couple of years the city has been making
it easier to recycle stuff, instead of throwing it in with the trash, by
allowing waste paper, plastics, glass, and metal cans to be put out in a
single container instead of separately. And since they are phasing in this
"commingled" pickup neighborhood by neighborhood, there's an ongoing trickle
of announcements about it. (Ours was one of the first, and I forget which
types formerly could not be mixed.)

Here are a few examples, from "about 26,000" raw Google hits on the search
  commingle* philadelphia recycl*

=====
City of Philadelphia official document, p. 8, along with other paragraphs on
sanitation and recycling:
http://mbec.phila.gov/procurement/bids/S1YL66903AD.PDF
 16. Can the City provide an example of how the Average Market Price Formula
and Base Rate Index is applied?
 Answer: The Commingled Container index is added to the Newspaper, Mixed
Paper and Cardboard index and the sum is multiplied by 75%. An example for
how this value is applied is provided in Section 2.14.2.

University of Pennsylvania:
http://www.upenn.edu/sustainability/recyclemania.html
The Climate Action Plan calls on the University to reduce its overall waste
stream and increase its diversion rate of paper, cardboard, and commingled
(glass, plastic #1 and #2, and metal) recyclables to 40 percent by 2014.

Vermont Public Radio. (Google's cached snippet has "commingle", but the live
page has "co-mingle".)
http://www.vpr.net/npr/92913195/
On a recent Friday morning, Arlington's environmental programs manager, Mike
Clem, showed up at my house to observe my recycling habits. Every week, I
put all the plastic, metal and glass in a yellow bin. Then I put all the
paper products out at the curb in paper bags. Clem tells me I can put junk
mail, even envelopes with windows, cereal boxes and newspapers, all in one
bag.
    It turns out there's a name for this system of recycling. It's called
dual stream. Put all the paper products in one place, then co-mingle all the
rest. Co-mingle is recycle-speak for "throw everything else together."
=====

Note that the first quotation uses "commingled" as a noun, with "Commingled
Container index" in parallel with "Newspaper, Mixed Paper and Cardboard
index".

Walking around my neighborhood, the Penn campus, and in between, I see
"commingle"* used as a noun, on (often handwritten) signs and stenciled on
dumpsters, as in

    NO TRASH
COMMINGLE ONLY

* Or possibly "commingled". I haven't paid attention, but may try to do so
in the next few weeks.

My guess is that the people who put up such notices haven't encountered this
infrequent word before its use in this program, and that they have not
unreasonably inferred from context that "commingle(d)" means "mixed
recyclable materials", as opposed to "trash (that is not for recycling)".
Cf. "transistor [radio]", if you remember that far back.

m a m

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org