Economic unit commitment is a mix-integer large scale optimization problem calling for powerful and efficient tools. On the other hand, environmental impact related to the power generation is attracting increasing attentions due to the global warming trend and urgent calls for sustainable energy development. In this paper, the dual objectives of economic and emission unit commitment is converted into a single objective problem. For solving this, a novel binary Jaya optimization is proposed and integrated with lambda iteration method. The proposed binary Jaya method is inspired by the Jaya evolution and generates binary bits from a v-shape transfer function. Numerical study demonstrates the significant improvement of the binary Jaya in regarding the convergence speed for solving unit commitment problem. The solution distributions of the both objectives also show the effective of the proposed methods.