  We study interstellar dust evolution in various environments by means of
chemical evolution models for galaxies of different morphological types. We
start from the formalism developed by Dwek (1998) to study dust evolution in
the solar neighbourhood and extend it to ellipticals and dwarf irregular
galaxies, showing how the evolution of the dust production rates and of the
dust fractions depend on the galactic star formation history. The observed dust
fractions observed in the solar neighbourhood can be reproduced by assuming
that dust destruction depends the condensation temperatures T_c of the
elements. In elliptical galaxies, type Ia SNe are the major dust factories in
the last 10 Gyr. With our models, we successfully reproduce the dust masses
observed in local ellipticals (~10^6 M_sun) by means of recent FIR and SCUBA
observations. We show that dust is helpful in solving the iron discrepancy
observed in the hot gaseous halos surrounding local ellipticals. In dwarf
irregulars, we show how a precise determination of the dust depletion pattern
could be useful to put solid constraints on the dust condensation efficiencies.
Our results will be helpful to study the spectral properties of dust grains in
local and distant galaxies.
