Societies have prospered under a linear “take-make-use-dispose” paradigm, extracting natural resources to make products, using them, and ultimately discarding them or their residues. This model has driven economic growth but at the cost of resource depletion, pervasive pollution, biodiversity loss, and an escalating climate crisis. In response, industries and governments are seeking technologies that can meet societal needs while advancing broader sustainability goals – resource circularity, carbon neutrality, and equity among them. This pursuit has become a catalyst for research and development to support a transition toward a circular bioeconomy, but a critical challenge has been the vast landscape of possible technology development pathways and the lack of transparent, consistent frameworks to target research and investment.

This presentation will introduce our approach to prioritize research, development, and deployment (RD&D) pathways for emerging technologies to achieve a more sustainable, climate-smart circular bioeconomy. Using a structured methodology – quantitative sustainable design (QSD) – we integrate process design, simulation, techno-economic analysis (TEA), and life cycle assessment (LCA) under uncertainty to elucidate key drivers of system sustainability, to characterize performance gaps, and to optimize technology and system design. By simulating the deployment of new technologies across many contexts, we identify combinations of locality-specific factors (i.e., typologies) that cause potential deployment scenarios to cluster together in terms of technology sustainability. Leveraging examples from our work in wastewater treatment and energy/nutrient recovery, I will demonstrate how we simulate the scale-up of early-stage technologies to guide their development and to identify contexts in which they have the greatest potential for impact. Finally, I will share lessons we have learned in making our computational tools open-source as we work to support an ecosystem of innovation in water technology development.