In order for companies to attain greater reductions in environmental burdens during manufacturing operations, they need to consider environmental aspects during their initial product development stages. This places an additional burden on designers and process engineers who already need to meet multiple objectives within tight constraints. Consequently, environmental aspects are rarely considered in their decision making process. Thus, if environmentally conscious decisions are to be made, the utilization of existing information must be maximized. In response to this problem we propose an approach for storing and reusing environmentally-related process information of similar component process plans via environmental process model templates. These templates will contain standard environmental information and models associated with manufacturing operations and thus should effectively support environmentally conscious decisions in component process planning and eventually design. We illustrate how the templates can be developed for a gear process planning example.