9 Mar 2026

Sunway University Graduate Featured in The Edge Malaysia: Making Reusable Foodware Mainstream

Sunway University graduate Yap Mei Xin was recently featured in The Edge Malaysia for her groundbreaking work in starting the OPACK team. OPACK is a Malaysian sustainable catering solutions company that provides reusable cups and food container systems, aiming to inspire businesses and individuals to adopt their innovative rent-and-return reusability solutions.

"Like most Malaysians, Yap Mei Xin noticed a growing pile of plastic containers in her house during the Covid-19 movement control order from food delivery orders. Unlike most people though, Yap found it concerning and set about trying to find a solution to this problem.

At the time, she was studying for a supply chain management degree at Sunway University, with little exposure to sustainability topics, other than the many posters on Sustainable Development Goals plastered around the campus.

“They’re literally everywhere, even in the toilets,” Yap jokes.

She took the initiative to conduct research into possible solutions, and soon decided on one: a container rent-and-return system that reduces packaging waste from takeaways. She pitched the idea to Sunway iLabs, the innovation lab of Sunway Group, and received a RM5,000 grant for the project.

Yap started by working with canteen operators in the campus. The seed grant was used to buy food containers, which she then placed in various locations within varsity grounds for students and lecturers to use for free. For two weeks, she monitored usage and had planned to collect the used containers to wash.

“The result was surprising. Nobody used the containers. At first, it was thought that concerns would be over the hygiene of the containers or that they might be stolen. But no, people just didn’t care about them,” says Yap.

Convenience, she realised, was more important to them.

An event organiser for a car boot sale in Sentul Depot invited her to set up a stall at the market, offering rent-and-return food containers and cups. Those who used her service would receive a RM1 voucher to spend in the market.

The experience was positive. Yap and her Opack team then began reaching out to other markets, utilising the same model.

But they soon hit a roadblock.

“We thought it was going quite well. But somehow, we couldn’t go beyond a certain number. The best we could get was just 100 [transactions] a day, and that’s not really sustainable.

Luckily, another opportunity presented itself to the Opack team — this time, from corporations that wanted zero waste when catering for internal events. KPMG was its first corporate customer, Yap recalls. Opack provided the containers, cups and cutlery for the company’s events and collected them after use to be washed.

While Opack has come a long way since it started, Yap and her team are eager to tap into new markets, particularly those that serve food and beverages. Catering for events is impactful, but it is often a one-off transaction. To achieve more scale, Yap hopes to work with businesses from the theme park, cinema and airline industries, which have high footfall in an enclosed environment.

“For example, in the cinema, all the food and beverages are just given to you, and after the movie, you throw them away. You can change that to reusable packaging and not much education is needed. The operators can provide the soft drinks in a reusable cup and tell customers to throw it into a bin after they exit the cinema,” she explains.

No deposit is needed because the Opack team has observed over the years that the return rate tends to be higher without it.

“In Malaysia, when you collect deposits, people think they’ve already paid for it … When we don’t collect deposits, the return rate is higher,” says Yap.

Instead, companies purchase the reusable foodware and Opack will customise a solution for them, including by setting up a collection and washing system.

“For instance, a theme park might require different rental mechanisms because it has many food providers,” says Yap.

This will be the focus for Opack this year. A high-hanging fruit, though, is the problem that first triggered Yap to start Opack: single-use plastic packaging from food deliveries.