They picked kind of weird things. Really, really high hanging fruit. The impact of these optimizations would definitely be small, not completely irrelevant but not enough for any one person to notice (unless they like / dislike the changes). This is an interesting way to take on the problem, instead of tackling a huge goal like waste reduction without any concrete attainable results, you create less possible waste to start with. By shortening a cotton swab, you throw less away. You are constrained in how much you can waste by how much is there.

I want to reduce the amount of plastic thrown away each year. I can try to educate the public about what plastic does, where it goes, how it breaks down (hundreds of years), how it's creating an invisible garbage patch in the pacific, but quite frankly, people don't fucking care. We're too small to see the patterns in the hugely complicated system that is the planet. You know how you solve that? Remove the temptation to throw things away, mitigate the trash that needs to be thrown away, and show people the destruction. Or, you could find a way to use that waste.