Footwear company Keen announced the winners of their Hybrid:Stand contest this month, which resulted in a total of $150,000 in prize money being awarded to eco-friendly projects across the US.

The winner of the Stand Up - the category for creative projects, was Spencer Brown from California. His project, named Rent-a-Green Box.com, is the first, comprehensive zero-waste pack and move solution in America. After spending $800 on cardboard boxes he knew would end up landfills, Spencer Brown decided to search for an eco-friendly solution for house movers. His solution was to take trash from local landfills and transform it into a suite of sustainable, cradle to cradle, packing and moving products.

Plastic bottles found under your kitchen sink and laundry room, are recycled into a series of three durable, rentable and reusable moving boxes called Recopacks, and for every 100 Recopacks rented, over 500 pounds of hard to recycle plastic trash is removed from landfills, and over 350 pounds of packing and moving waste is prevented from entering landfills.

The second category, Stand Out - for outdoor sportsmen and women, was won by Leslie Freeman, who started a nonprofit in 2000, Wild Science Explorers, which takes low income youths on six day science education rafting trips down the Lower Salmon River in Idaho. These trips incorporate science education activities, service projects for the BLM, weed surveys for the Idaho County Cooperative Weed Management agency, audio diaries and Leave No Trace training.

The final winner, in the Stand For category for non-profit organizations or initiatives, was won by Brian Bell from Minneapolis, the president of the University of Minnesota Chapter of Engineers Without Borders. The organization is partnering with Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) in Haiti to produce a recycling system for the plastic water sachets used by Haitians' to transport their drinking water. Currently these sachets are often discarded onto streets, so the organization is researching methods for the re-melting and re-molding of the sachets into durable footwear for Haitian children.

The three winners each received $25,000 from Keen for their projects, and five runners up in each category also received $5000 each.