Provided by Sam Baker
WriggleBrew founder and CEO Sam Baker runs his unique worm-based company out of several places, including one in Plano that’s “half office, half residence,” with a network of nurseries across North Texas serving as live test labs. His mission sounds almost impossible: use earthworms to turn plastic waste into rich organic fertilizer — and in the process, help clean up the planet.
“Basically, we started as a business using earthworms to make organic fertilizer,” Baker says.
But this truly organic idea didn’t start in Texas. It started in Florida.
Baker, who attended the University of Central Florida, says a bunch of fertilizer made its way into the waters he liked to fish, which in turn killed them all.
Provided by Sam Baker
“I like to go fishing, so that was very upsetting,” Baker says during a phone interview. However, what spawned from this tragedy was an idea.
Baker and a few friends, armed with chemistry and biochemistry backgrounds, began using earthworms to make fertilizer. Then a batch of old research papers shifted the course of their work.
“We stumbled upon these papers from a while back talking about worms being able to eat certain kinds of plastics,” he recalls. “Worms can make fertilizer that’s better for the environment, but can they make that fertilizer by eating plastic as a food source?”
In 2023, Baker pitched the idea to the National Science Foundation. A $275,000 Phase I grant gave WriggleBrew the resources to build what he calls a bioreactor — “a vessel that simulates a worm’s gut.” Six months in, they hit a breakthrough: “We were able to have it destroy a pound worth of plastic every five days or so… No microplastics, no nano-plastics leftover, no toxins.”
The processed material then goes to earthworms, which turn it into worm castings — “worm manure fertilizer” — just like they would with compost. Baker began testing it with nurseries like North Haven Gardens in Dallas and Roy Ball’s Shades of Green in Frisco. “We got some testimonials from them… and we took our data to the National Science Foundation and we asked for a phase two… $1.2 million… and we just heard that we have been awarded that grant,” Baker verified excitedly.
That money will help scale production and broaden testing. “We just got the worms to eat plastic bags, LDPE plastic, for the first time as of this week,” he adds. Larger trials are underway, including a ranch in West Texas. “We’ve had a lot of conclusively positive results,” he says. On a Maryland soybean farm, their fertilizer boosted yields from the usual 38–45 bushels per acre to 56. “That’s like a 20% increase in yield,” Baker says. Corn saw similar leaps, with nutrient levels “almost triplicate” compared to conventional fertilizer.
The process doesn’t work on every plastic. PVC, Baker explains, “kills everything” because of its chlorine content. PET — the stuff used in soda bottles — is tough to break down. But HDPE plastics, like milk jugs, are fair game. WriggleBrew is already eyeing nursery waste streams, including the polystyrene used in pottery shipping.
Scaling the idea has opened up new possibilities. “We had the same idea actually,” Baker says when asked about landfill applications. “If you can go to where the problem is, that’s even better.” He’s exploring manufacturing the key enzyme so it could be used in landfills, ocean cleanups, or even “in your backyard” for household plastic waste.
Provided by Sam Baker
Not every worm is cut out for the job. Out of thousands of species, Baker has found success with red wigglers and blue Indian worms, which “are ravenous — they chew right through it.” African night crawlers, despite their fame among fishermen, lag behind. And when it comes to worms that can eat plastic directly, the list narrows to a few larval species, like black soldier fly larvae and waxworms — though for WriggleBrew, the artificial worm gut is more efficient for scale.
Baker’s father still lives in Texas, which made the Lone Star State a natural hub for the agricultural side of the work. “That’s where home is,” he says. Florida remains their production base, but Texas — with its nurseries, ranches, and wide-open potential — is where WriggleBrew’s plastic-eating worms are proving their worth.
The goal is as ambitious as it is oddly humble: clean up plastic waste, boost crop yields, and do it all “without microplastics or nanoplastics leftover.” In Baker’s mind, the path forward isn’t paved with shiny high-tech machinery but lined with soil, castings, and the quiet labor of thousands of worms.
“We have 40,000 [worms] right now ... and they eat about 50ish pounds a day,” Baker verifies. “So it's quite scalable and the fertilizer we get out of it, we are selling, and like I said, there are a number of stores that are buying it, so it's quite profitable compared to recycling.”
