The absolute majority of biology labs do things that don’t need disposable material. It used to be many used radioactive reagents but their use has decreased significantly as well. My lab used to use glass pipettes well into the 2010s because they were the miserliest PIs ever among other things. They only allowed everyone to use disposable pipettes when they became cheap enough or cheaper than the extra lab tech it needed to keep the pipettes flowing.
Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change.
Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.
Most labs can totally very easily cut down on 80% of their waste output with a tiny bit of extra grease and some process change.
Heck if you really want to, you can go further - even consumables no one in western labs would think to reuse, like tissue culture flasks and pipette tips, were reused in my lab in india because they were poor. Discard tips that didn’t touch any bad reagent into a separate box for washing and ruse them for non critical steps, not that hard. Tissue culture flasks can’t be washed but you can reuse them multiple times without significant issues. For most cell line cultures this should have no effect on the result.