The increasing demand for consumer electronics and the rapidly changing development of technologies cause growing e-waste volumes. In order to fulfill demanding needs, recycling this waste would reintegrate mass and precious metals as a secondary raw material. Additionally it could cover a significant part on industrial resources. Furthermore landfill volumes and stocks of raw materials are conserved by an adequate recycling of scrap components. Additionally, health impacts are diminished by an appropriate treatment of e-waste. A holistic analysis of the whole process chain (collection - sorting/dismantling - treatment - metallurgical reutilization) will be carried out for an improved recycling of critical raw materials from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). This finally results in more beneficial feedstocks for the secondary metallurgy as well as increased yields of precious metals and the recovery of additional technological metals. To identify potentials in the existing processing, researches on material compositions in different WEEE fractions as well as extensive characterizations with a variety of thermal, pyro- and/or hydrometallurgical pretreatment steps are performed. These mainly exhibit significance for various fractions of the large-scale processing trials to show related material flows and the ability to influence them within these tests. The evaluation of these tests results in various optimization options. A second important goal in addition to optimize the mechanical processing is the design of possible recycling concepts for selected WEEE-fractions in order to exploit their potential and recirculate the material at the best to the material cycle.