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Performing life cycle impact assessment with the midpoint and endpoint method ReCiPe

Nature Protocols (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method to understand and reduce the environmental impact of products over their life cycle. Although general guidelines to perform LCAs are available, specific recommendations on performing and reporting the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) step in a standardized way are lacking. This lack can lead to incomplete results, followed by misinterpretation. In the LCIA step, the magnitude and significance of the potential environmental impacts are quantified and evaluated. Here, we describe how to systematically perform and report the LCIA step, identify the most meaningful LCA results and check their robustness. To develop the procedure, we used the widely applied LCIA methodology ReCiPe, which includes so-called characterization factors that express the environmental impact per unit of emission or extraction for 18 midpoint categories, such as global warming and acidification, and three endpoint categories (human health damage, ecosystem damage and resource scarcity). The characterization factors are developed for three perspectives, addressing inherent value choices in the calculation models. To demonstrate its use, our method was applied to a passenger car tire case study. We argue for the inclusion of all three endpoint categories and all three perspectives in the initial assessment. Furthermore, we recommend including a midpoint-to-endpoint contribution analysis on the impact results to identify the most important midpoint categories. Being comprehensive on the LCIA results will lead to a clear, distilled message to stakeholders to decrease environmental impacts, without unintended burden shifting across the supply chain or between different environmental impacts.

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Fig. 1: General cause–impact pathway to derive characterization factors at the midpoint or endpoint level.
Fig. 2: Overview of impact categories and areas of protection included in the ReCiPe2016 method.
Fig. 3: Stepwise procedure for impact assessment with ReCiPe.
Fig. 4: Damage caused by passenger car tires when driving 50,000 km for each area of protection and perspective.
Fig. 5: Normalization scores (person × year) when a car tire is driven for 50,000 km.
Fig. 6: Contributions of the midpoint impact categories to each area of protection for the three perspectives when a car tire is driven for 50,000 km.
Fig. 7: Contributions of the tire life cycle stages to the three endpoint categories for the case of driving 50,000 km.
Fig. 8: Normalization scores (person × year) for each midpoint category for the three perspectives when a car tire is driven for 50,000 km.
Fig. 9: Contributions of the tire life cycle stages to various midpoint impact categories for the case of driving 50,000 km.

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Data availability

The case study inventory data are available in Hennequin et al.36. The LCA results for the case study as performed here are available in Supplementary Data 1.

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Acknowledgements

M.A.J.H. has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101134894 (SOSFood). The authors thank T. Ligthart and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of the paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Sciences, Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Rosalie van Zelm & Mark A. J. Huijbregts

  2. Department of Circularity & Sustainability Impacts, TNO, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Thomas Hennequin & Mark A. J. Huijbregts

Authors
  1. Rosalie van Zelm
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  2. Thomas Hennequin
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  3. Mark A. J. Huijbregts
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Contributions

R.v.Z., T.H. and M.A.J.H. designed and validated the tutorial and analyzed the data. T.H. and R.v.Z. performed the case study and prepared the visualizations. R.v.Z. wrote the manuscript. M.A.J.H. and T.H. edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rosalie van Zelm.

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Nature Protocols thanks Sabrina Spatari, Ashkan Nabavi-Pelesaraei and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Data 1

Supplementary data results, including results embedded in Figs. 1–9

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van Zelm, R., Hennequin, T. & Huijbregts, M.A.J. Performing life cycle impact assessment with the midpoint and endpoint method ReCiPe. Nat Protoc (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-025-01207-y

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