This study presents a sustainable design method to optimize the embodied energy and CO2 emission complying with the design code for reinforced concrete column. The sustainable design method effectively achieves the minimization of the environmental load and energy consumption whereas the conventional design method has been mostly focused on the cost saving. Failure of reinforced concrete column exhibits compressive or tensile failure mode against an external force such as flexure and compression; thus, optimization analyses are conducted for both failure modes. For the given sections and reinforcement ratios, the optimized sections are determined by optimizing cost, embodied energy, and CO2 emission and various aspects of the sections are thoroughly investigated. The optimization analysis results show that 25% embodied energy and 55% CO2 emission can be approximately reduced by 10% increase in cost. In particular, the embodied energy and CO2 emission were more effectively reduced in the tensile failure mode rather than in the compressive failure mode. Consequently, it was proved that the sustainable design method effectively implements the concept of sustainable development in the design of reinforced concrete structure by optimizing embodied energy consumption and CO2 emission.