Ottawa – Reduce, reuse, recycle – Heritage Day 2009 is an opportunity for Canadian communities to celebrate the numerous environmental benefits achieved from the rehabilitation of heritage properties. HCF promotes the third Monday in February each year as Heritage Day and has long advocated adopting this date as a national holiday.

This year, HCF is celebrating Heritage and the Environment: Saving Places Built to Last. A number of useful resources are available online to assist communities in developing a program around this theme—whether it is to celebrate the inherently green credentials of historic buildings, to highlight how they have been upgraded to more environmentally friendly standards, or to offer information on how to “green” heritage buildings.

Visit HCF’s website to access these heritage resources.

Tell us about your “Heritage and the Environment” Heritage Day project, and we will post it on our website. Just send a short story and a photo to heritagecanada@heritagecanada.org and type “Heritage Day Project” in the subject line.

HCF will continue to celebrate the Heritage 2009 theme when we host our annual conference, The Heritage Imperative: Old Buildings in an Age of Environmental Crisis, in Toronto this coming September. Join us in finding out how old buildings have answers for the biggest questions of our generation.