A picture that Michael Regione holds near and dear to his heart explains all the motivation behind his company and its mission.
Regione is the vice president of sales and marketing for Digital Bridge, a nonprofit Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based company that collects unwanted technology from clients that include institutional and commercial facilities to responsibly recycle or, more importantly, refurbish items and place them in the hands of people who need them. Like the person in Regione talks about in the photo.
“She found a job with one of our laptops,” he says. “Look what it helped do for this single mother.”
Digital Bridge started in 2010 as a student organization at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and has evolved into a nonprofit company that accepts unwanted technology across the country from companies and facilities looking to depose of it responsibly.
There is plenty of waste for companies like Digital Bridge to collect. According to their website, Americans throw away roughly 37 million tons of electronic equipment, and lots of it winds up in areas that pollute the environment. The idea behind the company came from the founder’s trip to Africa, where he observed, “piles of garbage, stuff that was dumped there from municipalities and large corporations that should have been recycled but wasn’t,” Regione says.
That's where companies like Digital Bridge come in. They work to secure contracts with companies and other organizations like school districts, universities or healthcare facilities to collect unwanted technology. They take the useful materials within the dumped technology and use it to refurbish laptops and provide them to organizations like the Sojourner Family Peace Center in Milwaukee, which provides shelter and assistance for victims of domestic abuse. Those organizations then distribute the laptops to those who can’t afford them.
Digital Bridge also has an online store where individuals and nonprofits can reach out to purchase items at reduced costs.
Regione says that Digital Bridge has helped prevent about 10 million pounds of e-waste from finding its way into landfills, with clients located across the country. He says they have distributed about 25,000 laptops in 2025.
Digital Bridge is currently focusing its attention on Fortune 2000 companies with hundreds of employees as well as other larger organizations.
One area of e-waste that companies like Digital Bridge are focusing on is data centers. Regione talked about a client that donated more than 350 servers that took a couple of weeks to remove.
“The servers go through our intake, and we have to destroy the hard drives, all the memory and depending on what’s in it, we pull all that out,” Regione says of the process. “Then we’ll sell the servers, because that’s goes for some money for us to make, and then they go on the eBay store.”
Another client turned over its unwanted telephones to Digital Bridge, whose staff turned them around and sold them to another company looking for a phone system. It’s the thrill-of-the-hunt for what each donation brings – and the ultimate end-goal of helping people who need it – that keeps Regione and his coworkers inspired by their mission.
“It’s almost like you go gambling, because you don’t know what you’re going to get,” he says. “Some of it is garbage we recycle, and then other ones you hit the jackpot, like wow, we can use this, and it goes back to the community.”
Dave Lubach is the executive editor for the facilities market.
