LEAF and SPARKHub compared: which lab sustainability framework fits

LEAF, in one paragraph

LEAF — the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework — is run by UCL and is the more widely adopted of the two across UK universities. It works at the level of a laboratory, and awards Bronze, Silver and Gold. Criteria are grouped into themes a lab manager will recognise immediately: waste, people, purchasing, equipment, IT, and sample and chemical management.

The levels are independent rather than strictly sequential — a lab can go straight for Silver without having held Bronze — and each level asks for a proportion of its criteria rather than all of them. Check the current threshold on the official platform rather than relying on a number quoted elsewhere.

SPARKHub, in one paragraph

SPARKHub — the Sustainable Practice and Research Knowledge Hub — was developed by UKRI and is moving towards an international governing board. Its public Action Library is organised very differently: hundreds of individual actions, each with a Bronze, Silver or Gold difficulty and a stable reference, split across research areas rather than across themes.

That structural difference is the important one. SPARKHub certifies the activity a group actually does. A wet lab, an animal unit, a mechanical workshop and a textiles studio are separate areas with separate actions, so a group works through the area that describes its own work rather than a general list.

The practical differences that decide it

Four things tend to make the decision in practice:

• Scope. LEAF assesses a laboratory as a unit. SPARKHub assesses the kind of research activity, which suits a group whose work doesn't look like a standard wet lab.
• Recognition. LEAF has the broader UK institutional footprint and is more likely to be the thing your estates or sustainability team already reports on.
• Structure. LEAF's themes map neatly onto the systems a lab already runs — freezers, chemicals, purchasing, waste. SPARKHub's action library is more granular and more specific to the discipline.
• Availability of guidance. LEAF publishes its criteria; SPARKHub publishes action titles openly and keeps the detailed guidance behind its own platform, so the authoritative wording lives there.

What both of them will ask you to evidence

Whichever framework you pick, the questions that cost the most time are the same, because both are asking whether the lab knows what it has and how it is used:

• Do you know what equipment you have, and is any of it shared rather than duplicated?
• Do you know how heavily the shared equipment is actually used?
• Is there a chemical and sample inventory people consult before ordering more?
• Are freezers managed — inventoried, defrosted, temperature reviewed — rather than simply full?
• Does surplus equipment get redistributed rather than skipped?
• Is there a waste process people follow, with evidence it happens?

This is why the assessment tends to be slow the first time and fast every time after: most of the work is assembling records that should exist anyway. Nothing about either framework requires carbon accounting from a lab, and any tool that offers you a certified carbon figure from booking data is overstating what that data can support.

Can you do both?

Yes, and for some groups it is the sensible answer — LEAF at the laboratory level because that is what the institution reports on, SPARKHub for the research activity because it describes the actual work better. The evidence overlaps heavily, so the second one costs far less than the first.

The failure mode to avoid is answering both from scratch in two separate documents. Keep the underlying evidence in one place and let each framework's answers point at it, or you will be maintaining two accounts of the same lab that slowly diverge.

How to start without stalling

The most common reason a lab gets stuck is trying to answer every criterion at once. A better order is: pick the level, read the criteria straight through without answering anything, mark the ones you could evidence today, and count them. That number is usually higher than people expect, and it turns the exercise from an open-ended project into a short list of gaps.

Write each answer as a statement of what the lab does with a pointer to where the evidence lives. An answer that says "we have an inventory" is weaker than one that says what is in it, who maintains it and when it was last checked.