The Solana Center for Environmental Innovation is very active educating and mobilizing the local community to improve San Diego region's environment. Solana Center serves as a critical community resource for composting, pollution prevention, water conservation, rainwater harvesting and rain barrels, organic gardening, school waste diversion, recycling and sustainable living, and used oil and oil filter recycling information.

Solana Center’s robust education programs and interactions at community events promote individual and collective participation in the health of our soil, air and water. In the past year:

• More than 20 outreach events educated the community on various topics that would make San Diego County a better place to live. Topics include composting, watershed protection, food waste prevention.
• More than 70 classes educated both adults and children on ways to protect our environment and build healthy soils.
• Almost 300 volunteers gave more than 1,000 hours to the community. Activities included education of children and adult, sorting and assessing waste, guiding visitors through the Eco Container, building and maintaining compost piles, supporting students who compost in schools.

Solana Center works with businesses to implement solutions to reduce their waste stream and minimize the total amount of waste ending in the landfill. Solutions include modify purchasing strategies, increase the use of reusable or recyclable material, implement a local compost system to divert organic waste.

Solana Center has been developing a mid-scale composting demonstration site and training at the Del Mar Fairground to demonstrate various compost systems that are more efficient at a larger scale than the individual backyard composting. The goal is to support the growing interest that businesses and organizations have in implementing a local solution for managing organic waste and ensure they can succeed in their implementation of a composting solution. Solana Center is very excited about this growing interest as it will benefit San Diego County in two ways: it will prevent huge amount of organic waste ending in the landfill and generating greenhouse gas; and it will feed soil locally allowing numerous farmers to grow healthy food.