Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge was the country’s first garden cemetery, founded in 1831 and spanning 175 acres.

The location recently marked another first — the first cemetery in the United States to switch entirely to battery-powered equipment. The cemetery earned American Green Zone Alliance certification through a partnership with Quiet Communities, a nonprofit dedicated to helping communities reduce health and environmental harm.

To talk more about the switch, meteorologist Dave Epstein spoke with Mount Auburn CEO Matthew Stephens on GBH’s Morning Edition. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Dave Epstein: I know there are towns like Cambridge, your neighbor Arlington, Lexington, Concord, [and] Belmont this year, [that] just [passed] a ban on the gas-powered [equipment]. What brought you here?  

Matthew Stephens: One of the questions that has floated through our heads over the last few years is: how can we do everything in a more sustainable way? How can we bury human remains more sustainably? How can we take care of the landscape? How can we heat and cool our buildings in a more sustainable way?

And so when we thought about the landscape, one of the things that emerged is how we maintain the landscape — the tools and equipment that we use. That led down a very complicated question around how would we care for the landscape in a more thoughtful way, and what would be required. It sounds simple, like, “OK, I’m just going to go buy some batteries.” But on the scale of 175 acres, it is way more complicated.

Epstein: Let’s delve into that a little bit. What have been some of the successes that you’ve had around this? What are some of the challenges? What’s still not working? Where’s the frustration? You know, so new with this transition.

Stephens: What is working is string trimmers, chainsaws, blowers to some degree. Those were more turnkey, although it’s tricky because we’re not buying just one, right? You know, this is not just our residential landscape. We’re buying dozens of these. And so the challenge inherent in that is the logistics behind it. How do we set up the charging station ... for dozens of batteries, all within legacy facilities that haven’t really been designed to store or charge? I think we’ve maxed out the electrical abilities within one of our structures at this point. So the first is just like, well, how do you do that?

The second is really understanding the limitations that are just inherent in the technology still. So when it’s rainy and we’re trying to mow or blow and the tools that are there just still aren’t as strong as gas-powered. But we sort of figured out really thoughtful ways to try to mitigate that. And we’re the first cemetery in the country to ever receive this certification, which is really meaningful to us. The certifying entity that gave us this certification [the American Green Zone Alliance], they gave us this exemption because they’re like, “Well, we don’t know cemeteries and we actually can see that you’re going above and beyond what’s required here.” But there still are these “use cases” for wet leaves in fall where you’ll still have to use gas-powered [equipment]. So there’s a small exception, but in general, most of the sort of handheld fleet has been transitioned over.

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Epstein: When you’re looking at the budget, was there a significant change to the budget? Is there cost savings? Is it more expensive?

Stephens: We’ll see. I mean, we just transitioned this spring. And so obviously there will be no fuel costs, there will be electrical costs, and then there probably will be lower long-term maintenance costs. What we do know is that overall with this transition, it’s about 16 tons of carbon dioxide a year that is not being released. And no one really knows what 16 tons of carbon dioxide is, right? But that’s really the equivalent of 660 mature trees absorbing carbon dioxide, right? And that’s just our handheld fleet. And so that feels like a significant contribution to our communities where we’ve added the equivalent — or maybe not produced — the equivalent of 660 trees worth of carbon dioxide that’s being soaked up.

Epstein: What would you say to a town manager, municipalities, folks that maybe are going into Town Meeting, that want to do this? Give us a couple of tidbits for how they might do it.

Stephens: I mean, number one, I think people are mostly driven for the sustainability. There is a second offshoot, as being an active cemetery — noise matters, sound matters, right? So part of the awe of Mount Auburn is that it’s a portal to somewhere else. And so when you have a backpack blower, that definitely takes away from that sense of awe or inspiration. So that’s really a key quality of life component that people should think about.

The third thing is just the practicality of this. It is actually really hard to transition. We’ve actually had peer cemeteries, peer public gardens coming to us and say, “How do we do this? We can’t actually figure out all the moving parts to make this happen.” The third part is just, it sounds simple, but on the scale of a city or another public landscape is actually a little tricky. And we’re actually really happy to start to provide training on how we’ve done it to sort of help facilitate other cities or other gardens or other public landscapes to be able to make the same transition.