van Zelm Rosalie, Hennequin Thomas, Huijbregts Mark A J
Department of Environmental Sciences, Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Circularity & Sustainability Impacts, TNO, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Nat Protoc. 2025 Jul 9. doi: 10.1038/s41596-025-01207-y.
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.
生命周期评估（LCA）是一种了解和减少产品在其生命周期内对环境影响的方法。尽管有进行LCA的一般指南，但缺乏关于以标准化方式执行和报告生命周期影响评估（LCIA）步骤的具体建议。这种缺乏可能导致结果不完整，进而产生误解。在LCIA步骤中，潜在环境影响的大小和重要性被量化和评估。在这里，我们描述了如何系统地执行和报告LCIA步骤，确定最有意义的LCA结果并检查其稳健性。为了开发该程序，我们使用了广泛应用的LCIA方法ReCiPe，该方法包括所谓的特征因子，这些因子表示18个中点类别（如全球变暖、酸化）以及三个终点类别（人类健康损害、生态系统损害和资源稀缺）中每单位排放或提取的环境影响。特征因子是从三个角度开发的，解决了计算模型中固有的价值选择问题。为了展示其用途，我们将该方法应用于乘用车轮胎案例研究。我们主张在初始评估中纳入所有三个终点类别和所有三个角度。此外，我们建议对影响结果进行中点到终点的贡献分析，以确定最重要的中点类别。在LCIA结果方面做到全面将向利益相关者传达一个清晰、精炼的信息，以减少环境影响，而不会在供应链中或不同环境影响之间意外地转移负担。
