Yes, it's silly. They surely use orders of magnitude more consumables (latex gloves, plastic bottle tops for chemicals...) in preparing a batch of mosquito proboscides than the hypothetical nozzle would take up.

The university's marketing department has been instructed to emphasize sustainability in its press releases, and the website reporting it has, like most news organisations that have survived, made the choice not to hire journalists with critical thinking skills but to have them rephrase press releases.