Reducing the energy consumption of a plant often conflicts with the investment required for heat recovery. This paper presents a design study of shell and tube heat exchanger and direct-contact heat exchanger in three retrofit configurations. Multiobjective optimizations are employed to find optimal solutions that increase exergy efficiency at justifiable costs. A numerical modelization of heat transfer equipements is developed using heat transfer, pressure drop and cost correlations from the open literature. In order to verify the capability of the proposed approach, a case study for heat recovery in a pulp and paper plant is presented. In which multiple structural modifications of existing heat recovery systems are proposed based on an analysis of the Grand Composite Curve pinch targeting method. Each proposed modification is subject to multiobjective optimization based on the fast non-dominant sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). The case study's results shows significant steam operation cost reduction of up to 89% reducing exergy destruction by 82%. It has also been shown that for some heat recovery modifications the most cost effective solution is close to the minimum exergy destruction solution subject to equipment design constraints. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.