Background: Designing supply chains has become a strategic focus for companies aiming to stay economically competitive, particularly in a landscape shaped by global trade and faster industrial cycles. Purpose: This paper presents a novel strategic decision support model that integrates Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) with multicriteria optimization to facilitate sustainable value chain design. The goal is to identify the optimal solution(s) to a design problem while balancing multiple sustainability criterion. Study design/methodology/approach: The study employs an integrated approach that combines Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for environmental criteria and Life-Cycle Costing (LCC) for economic criteria within a multi-criteria optimization framework. The model considers various strategic options, including material flows and investments in new technologies, and generates Pareto fronts to depict compromise solutions between conflicting criteria. The model's key innovation lies in its ability to optimize solutions while ensuring fairness and comparability between all prospective alternatives. This is achieved through a multicriteria optimization framework that evaluates multiple objectives and determines optimal solutions. To demonstrate the model's practicality and replicability, a real-world case study is presented in the forest sector, a challenging industry characterized by complexity and convergence. Findings/conclusions: Applying the model to a real-life case study demonstrates its potential to provide valuable information to decision-makers, and highlights its generic nature, making it applicable to a variety of industrial sectors.. The proposed model provides a novel decision support framework for companies seeking to develop a comprehensive sustainability strategy for their entire value chain, thereby enabling the identification of compromise solutions that balance minimizing environmental impacts with long-term viability. By presenting a generic and replicable approach, this paper contributes to the development of a functional strategic decision tool that can be used to support sustainable value chain design. Limitations/future research: The current multi-criteria optimization addresses only economic and environmental factors, but integrating social aspects remains necessary for comprehensive decision support in sustainable development. Incorporating uncertainty into the solutions presents an additional challenge, which could be mitigated by using a stochastic optimization framework to better account for risks and trade-offs.