Vermifiltration: Juan Carlos Guáqueta, the Colombian Worm King

You may see earthworms as little more than a bunch of slimy, wriggling shit eaters, andJuan Carlos Guáqueta wouldn’t disagree.

In fact, that’s exactly what he loves best about them. The baby-faced Colombian entrepreneur is counting on their appetite for all things organic — including human and nonhuman poo — to make vile wastewater safe for irrigating crops. Which makes Guáqueta and his worms all about turning brown to green, in just about every sense possible.

Guáqueta, 26, didn’t invent vermifiltration, as his worm-ridden cleanup process is known. It’s decades old. But he adapted and improved it, eventually founding his startup AcuaCare in Bogotá, Colombia, with his partner, a university professor. AcuaCare packages worms, microbes and enzymes into biodegradable, cardboard-box “treatment systems” that can literally scrub the crap out of water from toilets, sinks and contaminated wells and rivers.The result isn’t quite fit to drink, so no quenching your thirst with worm water. But it’s a perfectly safe and inexpensive option for plants — and the system itself could prove an environmentally friendly alternative to septic tanks as well.

The young entrepreneur got an early start, selling hand-painted drawings of a smiling sun at the age of 8 to help out his family. Guáqueta eventually bought a calf as a teenager — literally his first cash cow — and started a worm farm to recycle manure into organic fertilizer. “All it would do is sleep and shit, and I told myself, ‘All that manure had to be good for something,’” he says now. By the time he got his engineering degree, he was fattening 40 cows and producing 1.5 tons of fertilizer a month on the side. He later won a grant to visit Silicon Valley, and there learned about using worms for water filtration from a Chilean company called BioFiltro. During a Skype conversation, Guáqueta comes across as a preppy, short-haired young man you could easily mistake for a college student. He is meditative in his responses and moves his hands around a lot, but every now and then he’ll throw out a wide smile.

The world badly needs cheap and sustainable ways to treat polluted water. Ninety percent of all wastewater in developing countries is discharged untreated into rivers, lakes and oceans; worldwide, polluted water kills more people than all forms of violence, including war, according to a United Nations study. Worldwide, nearly 2 million children under age 5 die every year from water-related diseases. The global water treatment industry is worth more than $25 billion annually, and keeps growing as the demand for clean water increases.

Granted, organic-matter filtration like AcuaCare’s systems address only a portion of the wastewater problem, but “any level of treatment will help,” says David Zoldoske, director of the Center for Irrigation Technology at California State University, Fresno. He’s been testing a similar BioFiltro system at a California dairy farm and tomato processing plant, and says vermifiltration units could offer low-tech and affordable water-treatment options for the developing world. That’s important, because any new approach will need to pay for itself in a way that many idealistic eco-solutions often don’t.

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• Wastewater Treatment