End of Life Management of Automation and IT Devices

End of Life Management (EoL) will be more and more important not only for electr(on)ic, especially IT, devices but also for automation devices. Therefore the main goal of this contribution is to give an overview about the state of the art and further development trends in this field. In this paper, a first attempt for an evaluation model for finding optimal End-of-life strategies for specific devices is developed and presented. Based on this model, important devices within the modern automation technology are analyzed and ranked according to different criteria. The variety of the chosen factors shows, that it is very important to understand the products and the surrounding environment in detail. Special emphasis will be on new approaches for EoL of processand manufacturing devices like automated extraction of rare materials from scrap, using electronic scrap for education in automation, economical aspects of disassembly with special emphasis to SME`s and developing countries.