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Many corporations and nations have pledged to reach net-zero emissions within a few decades. Meeting such targets for greenhouse gases, plastics, etc. requires systematic methods to guide investment in technologies and value-chain alternatives, and develop roadmaps. The proposed framework is a multi-period planning model to guide optimal reforms in cradle-to-cradle life-cycle networks across the time horizon. It aims to meet environmental targets while minimizing the total annualized marginal cost of natural resources and the investment cost associated with adoption of novel technologies. This considers the evolution of technology readiness levels as S-curves or continuous time Markov-chains. Integrated Assessment models account for climate change, decarbonization due to energy mix changes, and carbon taxes. Multiple climate change scenarios and shared socioeconomic pathways are used to model the future. In addition to providing roadmaps, the outputs can also be used to identify technologies that will be robust to future scenarios. 

The urgency of action toward mitigating climate change and reducing material leakage into the environment is inspiring a plethora of innovative technologies, supply chains, and policy actions. These are targeted toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, natural resource uptake, and decoupling technological systems from fossil-based linear economies using circularity strategies. Industrial and governmental stakeholders are keen to rank these proposed eco-innovations and emerging alternatives based on their scope of contributing to a sustainable and circular economy to meet global warming curtailment and pollution mitigation targets. We describe a novel methodological framework that relies on a multiobjective optimization of cradle-to-cradle life-cycle pathways to screen from a large database of conceptual eco-innovations and rank them based on their potential for establishing a Sustainable Circular Economy (SCE). This methodology is implemented for a motivating case study to evaluate numerous packaging eco-innovations based on their improvement potential and readiness for adoption within the grocery bags value-chain network. It is demonstrated that a preliminary screening step identifies the 10 most promising eco-innovations from a large superset of alternatives, which if developed and adopted can help transition the value chain to a future scenario with net-zero emissions and adherence to the recycled and renewable-content targets set by the United States Plastics pact but at a higher cost.