The ISO 14001 environmental management standards exist to help organizations minimize how their operations negatively affect the environment (cause adverse changes to air, water, or land), comply with applicable laws and regulations. The material included in this family of specifications is very broad.
ISO 14001 is the standard against which organizations are assessed. ISO 14001 is generic and flexible enough to apply to any organization producing and/or manufacturing any product, or even providing a service anywhere in the world. It presents a structured approach to setting environmental objectives and targets and to establishing and monitoring operational controls.
The overall idea is to establish an organized approach to systematically reduce the impact of the environmental aspects which an organization can control. Effective tools for the analysis of environmental aspects of an organization and for the generation of options for improvement are provided by the concept of Cleaner Production.
source: wikipedia.org