Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in environmental footprints and their relationship to life cycle assessment (LCA), particularly in the field of industrial ecology. Environmental footprints and LCA have much in common, and it is clear that the strengths of LCA in assessing environmental impacts would allow many footprint topics to be addressed under an LCA look-alike framework. This paper starts with the idea of bringing clarity to the nexus between environmental footprints and LCA, an area that remains ambiguous and thus poses an obstacle to the robustness of footprint methods. Methods for accounting for environmental footprints have been reviewed using a selection of existing footprint indicators, including the carbon footprint, the water footprint, the land footprint, and the material footprint. The results demonstrate that each of the four footprints has two versions that apply weighting factors and characterization factors to inventory aggregation, respectively. The distinction between weighting factors and characterization factors is distinct. The former reflect the relative importance they are assigned in a study based on stated or revealed preferences and judgments, whereas the latter are derived from science-based mechanism models that communicate the relative contributions of inventory results to specific impact categories. Consequently, two broad categories of environmental footprints are identified, namely, Version 1.0 (hereafter EF_1.0) and Version 2.0 (hereafter EF_2.0). EF_1.0 and EF_2.0 differ in aspects other than the way they address inventory aggregation. Whereas the two footprint categories have own pros and cons, we argue that only EF_2.0 has the potential to constitute an integrated footprint family due to the risks of double counting and double weighting in the EF_1.0 model. Inspired by the results of two decades of intense debate in the LCA community, this paper establishes a unifying framework consisting of a four-step sub-framework for the accounting of environmental footprints and a three-step sub-framework for the integration of environmental footprints. Although this framework follows the general logic of LCA, it allows for wider applicability than current LCA frameworks as it can be implemented in contexts where there is no clear life cycle or even without an LCA. This paper proposes a composite index for environmental footprints, with the aim of providing decision makers with a holistic picture of the overall environmental impacts of investigated systems at multiple scales, ranging from individual products to the whole world. Our study offers novel insights into the fundamental nature of environmental footprints, particularly for those without LCA expertise. More importantly, it may serve as a starting point for clearing the footprint jungle, and for sparking discussion between research communities that are currently quite disparate, such as those of LCA, the water footprint, and the ecological footprint.