New environmental regulations have driven companies to adopt low-carbon manufacturing. This research is aimed at considering carbon dioxide in the operational decision level where limited studies can be found, especially in the scheduling area. In particular, the purpose of this research is to simultaneously minimize carbon emission and total late work criterion as sustainability-based and classical-based objective functions, respectively, in the multiobjective job shop scheduling environment. In order to solve the presented problem more effectively, a new multiobjective imperialist competitive algorithm imitating the behavior of imperialistic competition is proposed to obtain a set of non-dominated schedules. In this work, a three-fold scientific contribution can be observed in the problem and solution method, that are: (1) integrating carbon dioxide into the operational decision level of job shop scheduling, (2) considering total late work criterion in multi-objective job shop scheduling, and (3) proposing a new multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm for solving the extended multi-objective optimization problem. The elements of the proposed algorithm are elucidated and forty three small and large sized extended benchmarked data sets are solved by the algorithm. Numerical results are compared with two well-known and most representative metaheuristic approaches, which are multi-objective particle swarm optimization and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II, in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The obtained results reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm in finding high quality non-dominated schedules as compared to the other metaheuristic approaches.