As a large-tonnage by-product during the steel smelting process, the steel dust sludge has attracted more and more attention. How to reduce the pollution of steel dust sludge to the environment, efficiently recover valuable elements such as iron, zinc and lead from its complex components, and realize the comprehensive utilization of steel dust sludge are the goals of various steel dust sludge treatment processes. Iron and steel enterprises usually use roasting, magnetic separation, leaching and other processes to recover valuable elements from steel dust sludge. In this paper, different types of recovery processes are started with to improve the recovery rate and economic benefits, the extraction technology of valuable elements is discussed, which provides assistance for the treatment of steel dust sludge, and a new process combining fire and wet method is proposed. The results show that, whether it is wet method or fire method, the recovery of valuable elements of steel dust sludge in a single process has limitations and defects. The combined process of fire method and wet method not only avoids the problems in the wet method process, but also fills the shortcomings in the fire method, and has great advantages in solving the selective separation and collaborative resource utilization of valuable elements.