As society endeavors to pursue more sustainable water, sanitation, and resource recovery systems, a range of new technologies are required to replace existing infrastructure that was built to accomplish narrowly defined functions without considering externalities. To navigate through the vast opportunity space ahead of us, sustainability analyses must be integrated throughout the RD&D of technologies to ensure a trajectory toward sustainability. In support of this integration, we reviewed existing literature on the sustainability analyses of water/wastewater and broader environmental technologies and synthesized our findings into a structured methodology -QSD. We introduced QSD as a methodology that addresses four critical challenges in sustainability analyses that had been largely overlooked in the existing literature: Finally, the results of QSD can be used to inform decision-making, including in structured methodologies such as MCDA (e.g., quantified sustainability indicators can be used to evaluate, compare, and recommend technologies based on stakeholder priorities as in ). Tools and methods developed in the discipline of decision analysis can in turn be used in QSD for indicator selection (e.g., the MCDA Index Tool, the Delphi method 319 ) and prioritization (e.g., the analytical hierarchy process [AHP], 320 the preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations [PROMETHEE] approach 321 ). Moreover, with objective functions established in MCDA, tools developed for sustainability analyses can potentially be expanded to automate the optimization of system design in early-stage research and development , or to support stakeholder engagement in transparent planning and design processes. Overall, QSD offers the potential to reveal the sustainability implications of technology innovations under a given context, thereby enabling stakeholders at all levels to understand and make informed decisions about the multidimensional effects of technologies, ultimately contributing to the society's transition toward sustainability.