Green Accreditations

Follow the below steps to set up your lab cluster with a green accreditation programme, or to review your current practices in line with changes to accreditations. If these steps are not appropriate for your space, please contact us at: sustainablelabs@exeter.ac.uk 

1. Determine your Lab Cluster & Champions: If you are a new technical space, you may need to determine what spaces the accreditation will focus on. You will also need to appoint sustainability champions to drive this within your department. Include both technical and research staff to ensure best practices.
   
2. Choose an Accreditation: Select the most suitable certification based on your lab’s function shown in the table below. 
   
   

3. Notify Sustainable Labs: It is important you let us know about your lab space, chosen certification channel and appointed sustainability champions as this information feeds into the university’s wider sustainability goals.
   
   

4. Join the community: Join our Teams channel and bookmark our SharePoint site for guidance and resources to support your applications.
   
   

Sustainability Champions are nominated members of a lab space who lead on sustainability initiatives and support the delivery of green accreditations. Acting as key points of contact for sustainability queries, they play a crucial role in embedding environmentally responsible practices into daily lab operations.

Becoming a Sustainability Champion offers valuable personal and professional development. It’s a great opportunity to build skills in leadership, communication, project coordination, and environmental awareness. You can read more from some testimonials from our recent sustainability champions here: Testimonials.

While champions help coordinate and encourage sustainable action, it is important to remember that sustainability is a shared responsibility across the whole lab.

We recommend that lab clusters nominate both technical representatives—such as technicians, experimental officers, or lab managers—and academic representatives, including PhD students, postdocs, early career researchers, and principal investigators (PIs), to ensure broad engagement and impact.

Talk to your line manager or PI about becoming a sustainability champion for a technical space, to express your interest email us at: sustainablelabs@exeter.ac.uk  

LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework) is an online green lab accreditation programme developed by University College London. It supports sustainable and cost-effective lab management, teaching, and research by guiding users through improvements in areas such as energy, water, waste, travel, purchasing, and research quality.

LEAF includes baseline calculators to help labs measure the financial and carbon impact of their actions. Labs submit applications with supporting evidence, which are reviewed by the Sustainable Labs team.

With updated criteria launched in 2025, we encourage all users to reapply and demonstrate continued commitment to sustainability. We recommend all users to resubmit their awards at all levels every 2 years to show commitments to sustainability and awareness of changes and updates to the criteria.

To register to the LEAF portal and to be assigned to a lab cluster, refer to the LEAF user guide. More resources and guidance is available on our SharePoint site.

Get Started with LEAF: LEAF User Guide

Green DiSC is a new sustainability certification designed to help research groups and institutions reduce the environmental impact of their computing activities—an increasingly important area as digital research grows and the climate crisis intensifies.

Like LEAF, Green DiSC offers Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels based on key sustainability principles. The scheme is peer-reviewed, allowing participants to gain insights from reviewing other institutions’ applications while building a collaborative community of sustainability-minded researchers. We recommend any lab spaces focusing on digital research to assess their suitability for Green DiSC.

If you're trialling Green DiSC, please let us know—we’d love to hear from you and include your efforts in our records. For more information on enrolling, you can go to our SharePoint site, or contact info@greendisc.org for more information.