Increasing social pressure and strict legislations have resulted in changing the approach of traditional design practices to incorporate multiple objectives in the design of process plants. Distillation is one of the major operations in the chemical process industry that is widely used for purifying products or recovering solvents or separation of valuable reactants from waste stream. In this paper, a procedure for multi-objective optimization is discussed with the help of a distillation unit from hydrocarbon recovery plant of a distillate fraction process. The procedure developed here consists of four stages and is based on current design tools. The aim is to support decisions during design phase and optimize the process variables in order to generate a process with improved economics along with satisfaction of environmental objectives. Total potential environment impact and total annualized cost are used as indicator for environmental and economic objectives, respectively.