In reply to Chive Talkin\':
Yes, trying to run a lab in an environmentally friendly manner, in particular trying to minimize waste, is a chore.
We made a deiberate choice to return to glass measuring cylinders, glass pipets for everything above 5 ml and not involving cell culture or agarose (which sticks to the inside of the pipets and cannot be removed in the dish washer), racking our own micropiette tips, etc., even though that clearly is more work than buying tons of sterile packed plastic pipettes, pre-racked tips, and so on.
Unfortunately, all the sterile and sensitive stuff still comes in tons of plastic, even though shipping packages for chemicals have become noticeably smaller and the insulation material is normally not plastic anymore (at least when ordering from Roth or Sigma).
CB