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• Energy and materials demand are still receiving low scores for the 2009 LEED version. • Certified buildings make efforts in obtaining the minimum scores required by a specific label. • Insights are provided to strengthen the sustainability representation of LEED. Green labels have strong potential in identifying buildings with lower load on the natural environment, among which the leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED) is the most used certification worldwide. LEED's potential in truly reflecting a building's sustainability degree has been receiving criticisms in the scientific literature. The more recent LEED versions represent, in theory, improvements over the previous ones in an attempt to overcome such criticism. This work assesses the way in which LEED certification is pushing buildings towards higher sustainability degrees. Primary data are based on the Brazilian certified buildings up to 2016, totalizing 276 projects evaluated under statistical approaches, including the Kruskall Wallis analysis, credit achievement degree, and skewness indices. Results show that energy & atmosphere and material & resource categories received lower scores among all other categories for the 2009 LEED version than for the 2.0/2.2 version. The 2009 LEED framework allowed the certified Brazilian buildings to pursue those easier-to-obtain scores, which raises doubts about whether the LEED label push to strong sustainability since its core concept is based on energy and material consumption. Notwithstanding, the evaluated projects in Brazil pursue lower degrees of sustainability because they apply efforts in obtaining the minimum scores required by a specific label. Although demanding improvements, LEED certification should be promoted as an important tool towards sustainable development due to its innumerous advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Disposal alternatives of urban solid waste (USW) are being considered one of the main topics on the political agenda worldwide due to high concerns related to economic, social and environmental issues. In São Paulo Municipality, Brazil, the Sorting and Composting Waste Treatment Plant (SCWTP) is suggested as an appropriated way to manage the 14,000Mg of USW generated daily by 11 million inhabitants in 2010. The argument is that recovering materials from USW is aligned to sustainable development concept, however there is a lack of a deeper sustainability assessment, raising doubts about the benefits received by society on recovering materials. In this sense, emergy accounting (spelled with “m”) suggests to be a good alternative when assessing these benefits under a global scale. The aim of this work is to assess the São Paulo''s SCWTP using Emergy Accounting. Results shown that currently there is an emergy balance by sorting paper (ratio of recovered by invested emergy of 0.97), and an emergy benefit for iron&steel (2.65), plastic (2.91) and compost (2.57). However, there is an emergy cost by sorting glass (0.23) and aluminum (0.20). A plausible scenario by increasing the recovering efficiency of glass from current 11.6% to 52.9%, and aluminum from 4.7% to 24.7% (both in wet weight), results in an emergy benefit for all materials. The Net Emergy Benefit indicates the SCWTP as a better alternative when the total net emergy return to society is the focus, because while it makes available about 3.13E+14seJ/Mg of treated USW, the landfills have an average emergy deficit of −3.39E+13seJ, indicating that landfill uses more emergy than makes available. Results indicates that SCWTP must receive political incentives due to its good emergy performance and others social beneficial aspects, however, aiming to improve the overall performance, each individual citizen must collaborate with waste reduction and the separation of non-organic material from the organic ones at origin. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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