Spring Hill, Fla. — When Blake Merrell describes how he came to expand his family’s Indiana-based fertilizer business into Pasco County, Florida, he does so in biblical terms. The 37-year-old invokes the parable of the prodigal son — the son who squanders his inheritance but is welcomed back by his forgiving father.
Merrell grew up alongside his father’s employees in north central Indiana, where he worked after school and on weekends as a truck diver, mechanic, a farmer and a construction worker. But by his mid-20s he’d had enough.
He’d spent the last four years crisscrossing the country in a hazmat suit and goggles to clean out biowaste tanks. He wanted to settle down and start a family
So he parted ways with Merrell Bros. — the family business he’d worked for through his childhood and college — and spent the next few years in a largely unsuccessful daytrading venture. Then, his father began expanding the company’s footprint into Florida. “Maybe that’s where I can settle down,” Merrell thought.
“It wasn’t a prodigal son moment where they greeted me with a fattened calf and had a feast,” Merrell said. “But they probably let me get away with these ideas — kind of in the same way that the father welcomes the prodigal son back.” Now, Merrell’s ideas may be starting to pay off.
He’s chief operating officer of FloridaGreen, Merrell Bros.’ biosolids plant in Pasco County. The plant is rolling out a new patented method of taking tons of sewage, reducing its volume by close to 85%, and turning it into fertilizer pellets.
The Merrell family’s Christian faith is embedded into the company’s culture. The business is “owned by God,” per its website. They ask that “you pray for our company, employees, and leadership as we operate our business and our competitors who have not accepted Christ.” Plaques in FloridaGreen’s lobby bear the company’s five core values and corresponding Bible verses. The plant employs a corporate life coach who is also an ordained minister. Weekly devotional meetings draw roughly 20 employees at the Spring Hill plant.
Yet FloridaGreen sits inside a much broader debate that has little to do with faith and everything to do with scale. Florida’s population continues to grow, landfill space is shrinking, and long-standing methods of disposing sewage sludge are being challenged by citizens and restricted by new regulations. State lawmakers are now considering further limits that could dramatically reshape how biosolids are managed across Florida.
Merrell is convinced the state is barreling toward a critical shortage of disposal options. “I guess we feel like we're evangelists in that we know this is what's coming,” Merrell said. “We know there's a solution to it, and we just want to share the news.”
“This is bad,” he added. “It’s going to get bad fast. And nobody’s talking about it.”
“People don’t stop flushing their toilets”
The tons of sewage headed to FloridaGreen come from Pasco County treatment plants, which receive waste from homes and businesses through underground sewage pipes. At those plants, sewage is screened for debris, treated with bacteria to break down organic material and separated into water and solids. Cleaned water is released. What’s left is sludge.
In Charles “Red” Vancura’s truck, it takes five minutes to get from FloridaGreen’s entrance to where the treatment process starts at neighboring Pasco plants.
Vancura, Merrell Bros.’ director of Florida operations, walked through the county’s treatment process as sludge moved through pipes and tanks. First, wastewater is filtered through screens that remove trash. “That’s everything that comes from your toilet,” Vancura says, pointing at an open trash receptacle. From there, the liquid enters large tanks where bacteria break down organic waste.
“People call it bugs,” Vancura said. “They consume the sludge. They’ll eat it and then off-gas it.”
The liquid then enters clarifier tanks where solids settle to the bottom. At that point, the material is still mostly liquid — think “chocolate milk,” as Vancura and many site workers refer to it. Now, a polymer is injected to “dewater” the mixture. The chemical binds solid particles together, allowing them to be squeezed through belt presses.
“The dewatering phase controls the rest of the plant,” Vancura said. “If it stops, everything stops. People don’t stop flushing their toilets.”
Once the sludge leaves the county’s system, it’s trucked to FloridaGreen’s. At the plant, the first thing you notice is what you don’t notice: the smell. The processing line hums like a modern factory — steel tanks, conveyor belts and hoses quietly working behind beige walls. Here, the sludge is dried, pasteurized and pelletized using Merrell Bros.’ proprietary system. The company says the process kills pathogens, reduces volume significantly and results in fertilizer for consumer and agricultural use.
Christopher A. Impellitteri, a former environmental engineer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development, reviewed the company’s patents for WUFT and described FloridaGreen’s processing approach as one that will cut down on odors and produce top-grade fertilizer. “It's not gonna be a system that will work everywhere,” Impellitteri said. “But I think it's a system that I think will work well with Florida.”
Vancura said he previously worked with one of Merrell Bros.’ competitors in Central Florida. Merrell’s stewardship mission eventually won Vancura over, and he’s been with the company for three years. “A lot of the other competitors in the biosolids industry just aren't good stewards,” Vancura said. “They would try and skirt by and cut any corners possible.”
Merrell estimated that he’s wooed as many as 10 people from Vancura’s former employer to join FloridaGreen. “We take one of their guys if he meets all of our criteria to be a good culture fit and he's a person that wants to do things the right way and maybe hasn't been given the opportunity,” Merrell said. “It's kind of like a mean trick, but it's one that I keep going back to.”
“I feel like I'm kind of saving those people,” he added, "like I'm bringing them over to the good side from the dark side.”
“Higher calling”
FloridaGreen’s patented system is novel for predrying the sludge in greenhouses before pasteurizing it in an oven. The heated greenhouse floors speed up evaporation. The plant’s “Easy Bake Oven” is composed of two dry dog food pasteurizers stacked on top of each other.
The process is the brainchild of Merrell’s father, Ted. Ted Merrell and his younger brother, Terry, founded their eponymous company in 1982, in their rural hometown of Kokomo, Indiana, with a couple of pigs. Within three years it was a waste company pumping out manure from local hog farms to spread on nearby farms as fertilizer.
Blake Merrell continued to work there on weekends when he moved 45 minutes away to study agriculture at Purdue University. He joined Alpha Gamma Rho, an agriculture-centred fraternity. It was the type of work environment where you didn’t know who was your coworker and who was your uncle, Merrell said. “Everybody to me was just part of the family.”
Merrell said FloridaGreen, founded in Pasco County in 2018, has cultivated the same “Indiana farmer-Amish community” vibe he grew up with. “Everybody knows everybody,” Merrell said. “There’s just a certain culture with guys that run combines and tractors, and it's like that bread basket of America.”
The culture includes what Merrell described as a “Bible Belt, Indiana strong” identity. Kevin Murray, hired as a life coach, works with more than 100 employees throughout Florida. Nearly a year into the job, Murray — an ordained minister — describes his day-to-day mission as cultivating a “ministry of presence.”
“They brought me on to help with the whole person,” Murray said. “Looking at stewardship, not just from a biosolids standpoint, but taking care of people.”
Murray acts as the ecclesiastical glue of the plant, but emphasized that participation is voluntary and religious identity is not imposed on workers. “Not everybody here shares the same faith,” he said. “But the same principles apply: Caring about how we treat others, taking pride in what we do, doing good work.”
The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Lowe, a UF alum and courtesy professor at the university’s Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, studies the intersection of ecology and Christian theology. “There has been an increasing blind spot among many Christians and churches in the United States around conservation and environmental concerns and climate change now,” Lowe said. “But that has not always been the case, and it's not necessarily the case.”
Hebrew scriptures call on humans to “bear God's image and how we live in this world. And a lot of Christians over the years have understood that in terms of environmental stewardship,” Lowe said. “That's certainly become more urgent in this current season, as we see more and more environmental degradation and climate impacts intensifying and spreading. But the roots of all that go back to the beginning.”
Merrell Bros.’ own environmental values are grounded in biblical passages about stewardship, which Murray, the in-house minister, quoted during the interview. “Genesis 2:15,” he said. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to cultivate it and keep it.”
“We have an obligation, or higher calling, if you will, to be good stewards of this,” Murray said, pointing downward to the earth below him.
“God brings beauty from brokenness,” he said. “We take what seems spent and try to make something useful again.”
Shrinking solutions
While biosolids are often described broadly as fertilizer, they can take very different forms. In Florida, land-applied biosolids are often still moist, semi-solid material spread directly on fields under federal permits.
FloridaGreen’s pellets begin as the same sewage-derived solids but undergo additional processing — drying, pasteurization and pelletization — that reduces pathogens to Class AA standards, removes most moisture and turns the material into a uniform product. Supporters say those extra steps reduce odor and the risk of nutrients washing into waterways during heavy rains.
Historically, Florida has relied on three main pathways to dispose of biosolids: spreading them on land; burying them in landfills; or treating them further through composting or drying. Some of those methods carry risks.
About 25% of Florida’s sludge historically went on land — a federally permitted practice under EPA rules known as “land application.” While allowed, it is heavily regulated and has grown increasingly controversial because of groundwater contamination, odor complaints and emerging health concerns.
Merrell Bros. has never used land application in Florida. “Not one truckload,” Merrell said. “Because you put it on the grass, you get a big rain event, and those nutrients can wash off into the water. Then you’ve got algae blooms, red tide, blue-green algae, phosphorus — all of that.”
Though land application remains legal under federal rules, Florida lawmakers have moved to restrict it further. A 2023 state law limited land application based on phosphorus, too much of which can harm water quality. A current proposal before the Legislature, Senate Bill 290, would limit land application to Class AA biosolids, the highest-treated. The Senate Agriculture Committee unanimously approved the bill Dec. 2.
Merrell supports those changes but said they are destabilizing an already fragile system.
“Twenty-five percent of the state’s solution goes away,” he said of eliminating the Class B biosolids allowed to be spread now. “What do you do with the rest of it?”
At the same time, landfill space is shrinking. According to a report by the state Department of Environmental Protection and university researchers, Florida could exhaust its permitted landfill capacity as early as the 2040s depending on population growth.
Landfills will “price biosolids out,” Merrell said. “They don’t want it.”
Merrell said Miami has begun hauling biosolids out of state by rail to Georgia and Alabama because disposal sites inside Florida are filling up. And while FloridaGreen has focused heavily on odor control, other composting facilities in Florida draw complaints that they smell.
“Composting is the next cheapest thing after land application,” Merrell said. “But it’s also where all the scrutiny is.”
Unlike FloridaGreen’s enclosed system, most composting operations take place outdoors. Sludge is mixed with organic material and left in large piles to heat naturally through microbial activity.
“It works,” Merrell said. “But you get odors.”
He listed multiple Florida compost sites that have closed in recent years after residents complained to county officials. In some cases, newer housing developments were built near facilities that had existed for years. The “NIMBY” principle — “not in my backyard” — always wins, he said.
“What keeps you up at night?”
On a recent Friday in December, Merrell addressed more than 100 local government and waste-management leaders in one of what he calls his “summit talks.” Entrepreneurism underpinned by evangelism, the talks paint a grim future for Florida’s biosolids industry. And they paint Merrell as the guy with the solution.
“It's somewhat selfish,” Merrell said. “But it's also kind of like, we don't really see anybody else doing it, and it's our purpose."
His slides spell out Merrell’s predicted timeline for how and when each of Florida’s biowaste pathways may get squeezed.
“A lot of doom and gloom,” one audience member muttered.
Merrell aims for the summits to promote conversations and shared solutions. He asks icebreaker questions: What would keep you up at night related to biosolids? What would cause you to toss and turn?
The answers run the gamut. Attendees from Miami-Dade and Lee counties articulated struggles with capacity, Merrell said. “It definitely is affirming and scary because you get confirmation that even some of the solutions you thought were working really good” aren’t.
At times, the talks make him feel like Chicken Little. But he more often relates to Michael Burry, one of the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis in the late-2000s.
“This guy's an outlier,” Merrell said of Burry. “And then all of a sudden the housing crisis starts, and it's like, ‘Oh, yeah. He saw it, and he wasn't wrong.’ So it's kind of encouraging and reaffirming.”
FloridaGreen is one response to a state-level waste problem. But it is not the only technology available. Rotary dryers, composting operations, and waste-to-energy incineration plants remain in use elsewhere.
Merrell said many alternatives are expensive, energy-intensive or increasingly unpopular. And now that Class AA biosolids could become the state-mandated standard, Merrell said “utilities are going to have to scramble.”
Whether Florida can build enough new treatment infrastructure before disposal options disappear remains uncertain.
For now, FloridaGreen continues processing sewage into fertilizer behind closed doors, prayer plaques hanging in the lobby. While the company’s religious mission is ethereal, the problem it addresses is anything but.
“There’s no pause button,” Merrell said. “Waste doesn’t stop.”