Chernichcha Sopapir & Nattaphol Irinklai

Co-founder, EcoCrew

Industry : Advocacy

At a busy event, a single bowl or cup barely registers. Multiply it across thousands of visitors, however, and disposable food packaging becomes a substantial waste problem. Chernichcha Sopapir and Nattaphol Irinklai founded EcoCrew to tackle that problem at system level.

Their answer is a reusable rent-and-return service designed to work with the existing habits of event organisers, food vendors and visitors. Rather than asking people to overhaul how they behave, EcoCrew makes reuse part of the event infrastructure.
The founders’ backgrounds in software development proved particularly useful. A digital tracking system follows each bowl, cup and food container through its lifespan, supporting an inventory in which individual items can be reused hundreds of times before entering the recycling process. Technology and logistics, rather than good intentions alone, make the model workable at scale.

The numbers are already tangible. EcoCrew has partnered with more than 70 events and helped eliminate over 400,000 pieces of single-use waste. Its next ambitions extend beyond events into food delivery and other everyday applications.

For Chernichcha and Nattaphol, environmental responsibility has to make business sense as well as ecological sense. Their approach treats convenience as part of the sustainability equation – using technology, collaboration and practical design to make choosing reusable packaging less of an effort and more of a routine.