Crikey’s pick of today’s green news:

Snowy mountains make national heritage register. The south-east Australian Alps have been placed on the national heritage register, reports the Independent. The 1.5 million hectare site is the largest area to be listed, and was recently listed by the Australian Conservation Foundation as one of the 10 national icons most at risk from climate change.

Radioactive beer kegs menace public. The United Nations have called for increased screening on the disposal of radioactive goods, with reports of nuclear waste making its way into scrap smelters and ultimately consumer goods, Bloomberg reports. “Abandoned medical scanners, food processing devices and mining equipment containing radioactive metals such as cesium-137 and cobalt-60 are often picked up by scrap collectors and sold to recyclers, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear arm. De Bruin said he sometimes finds such items hidden inside beer kegs and lead pipes to prevent detection.”

Green posters. Treehugger has put together a great collection of war-time posters encouraging civilians to save and share. Our favourites include save waste fats for explosives, fighting famine by canning, and riding with Hitler (above).

Arctic melting leads to major changes. Warming in the arctic has lead to “shifts in populations of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish” writes Yale Environment 360. “Cornell University oceanographer Charles Greene, lead author of the study in the journal, Ecology, said that a warming trend “unprecedented in human history” had enabled microscopic algae from the Pacific Ocean to migrate through the Arctic to the North Atlantic for the first time in 800,000 years.”