  To a great extent, our understanding of the life cycle of dust is based on
the observational and theoretical studies of the Milky Way and the Magellanic
Clouds, which will be the topic of this contribution. Over past years, a large
volume of observations with unprecedented spatial resolution has been
accumulated for the Milky Way. It permits investigations of different stages of
the life cycle of dust, from its formation in stellar sources to destruction in
star-forming regions and supernovae shocks. Observations of dust emission,
extinction, polarisation of light, and interstellar element depletions in the
solar neighbourhood provide the most accurate constraints for the reference
dust models applied to study extragalactic systems. However, global spatial
studies of the circumstellar and interstellar dust are complicated in the Milky
Way disk because of high extinction, confusion along the line of sight and
large uncertainties in distances. In contrast, the favourable location in the
sky and the proximity of the Magellanic Clouds allow detailed multi-wavelength
studies of the dust-forming stellar populations and the investigation of
variations of the interstellar grain properties for the entire galaxies. They
enable the first comparison between the global stardust production rates from
theoretical calculations and those from observations, which confirm discrepancy
between accumulated stardust mass and observed interstellar dust mass - "the
missing dust-source" problem. Modelling of the life cycle of dust in the Large
Magellanic Cloud showed that dust growth by mantle accretion in the ISM, a
major dust source in the Milky Way, can be responsible for the existing dust
mass in the LMC. We will present comparison of the dust input from different
sources to the dust budgets of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, which
reveals how the role of these dust sources depends on metallicity.
