Discover what recycled glass and MPS certification mean for your terrarium: from the recycling process behind glass bottle gardens to what an MPS certification actually checks in growing terrarium plants.
Recycled glass and MPS-certified plants turn a terrarium into a more conscious choice: the glass of your bottle garden doesn't require new raw materials, and an MPS certification shows verifiably how a plant was grown, from crop protection to energy use. Together, these two choices don't shape how a terrarium looks, but they do determine what happened behind the scenes before it reaches your table. In this article we explain what recycled glass actually means for a terrarium, what MPS certification involves, and why these two things together make a difference for anyone who thinks consciously about their interior and their plants.
Glass is one of the few materials that can be reused almost endlessly without losing quality. During recycling, old glass is crushed into cullet, melted down, and recast into new bottles and jars - a process that uses considerably less energy than producing glass entirely from new raw materials such as sand, soda ash, and limestone. For a terrarium, this means the glass bottle housing your mini-ecosystem was made without mining any new raw materials.
Recycling aside, glass is one of the few materials genuinely suited to a long-term closed ecosystem. It's non-porous, doesn't leach anything into the soil or water inside, and doesn't degrade under moisture or UV light the way some plastics do over time. A terrarium needs to maintain a stable, humid environment for years without the material itself changing - and that's exactly where glass excels. The fact that recycled glass has the same properties as new glass means this sustainability choice takes nothing away from the terrarium's functionality.
A bottle garden like the Little Joe terrarium bottle is made from recycled glass. Because of the recycling process, small imperfections such as air bubbles can appear in the glass. This isn't a manufacturing defect but a direct consequence of reusing the material. These imperfections are usually barely visible, don't affect the quality of the glass, and become almost unnoticeable once the bottle is filled with plants, moss, and soil. Choosing recycled glass means accepting a small amount of natural variation in exchange for a bottle that required no new raw materials.
MPS (Milieu Project Sierteelt, Dutch for Environmental Project Floriculture) is an internationally used certification system originally developed in the Netherlands to make sustainability in the floriculture sector measurable. A grower who is MPS-certified has independent registration and auditing of how they handle, among other things, crop protection products, fertilisers, energy use, water, and waste. The certification exists in several levels and variants, so buyers - from wholesalers to end consumers - get a substantiated picture of the environmental impact of the plant they're bringing home.
Broadly speaking, an MPS registration looks at a fixed set of areas: the use and reduction of crop protection products, the amount of fertiliser applied, the grower's energy consumption, how waste and water are handled, and in some variants, the social working conditions at the grower. For a terrarium plant - often a small specimen expected to thrive for years in a closed environment - where it comes from matters just as much as the condition it arrives in.
MPS certification originated in the Dutch floriculture sector, historically one of the largest in the world, and has since become an internationally used system that growers worldwide can voluntarily commit to. The certification works through annual registration and auditing, meaning a grower must demonstrate compliance with the environmental criteria on an ongoing basis, not just once. For buyers - whether a wholesaler or a webshop sourcing terrarium plants - this means choosing an MPS-certified plant is a substantiated choice rather than one based on trust alone.
On their own, recycled glass and certified plants are already meaningful choices. Combined in one terrarium, they reinforce each other: the glass means no new raw material is needed for the vessel of your mini-ecosystem, and the plant itself comes with a verifiable origin. Want to put together a terrarium where both elements come together? Take a look at our terrarium DIY kits - here you'll find bottle gardens composed with exactly these kinds of material choices.
A closed terrarium is, at its core, already a small circular system: water evaporates, condenses against the glass, and falls back onto the soil, so you barely need to top it up. That idea of closing the loop applies not only to the water cycle inside, but also to the materials the whole thing is built from. Curious how that closed loop in glass actually works? Read more about it in our article on a sealed garden ecosystem in a glass bottle.
Yes, glass doesn't lose quality through recycling. However, the recycling process can produce small imperfections such as air bubbles; these are barely visible and don't affect the strength or quality of the bottle.
It means the grower has independent registration and auditing of how they handle crop protection products, fertilisers, energy, water, and waste. That gives you a substantiated picture of how the plant came to be, rather than only seeing how it looks on arrival.
Usually barely. The small imperfections that can result from the recycling process typically go unnoticed and become completely inconspicuous once the bottle is filled with soil, moss, and plants.
Because a terrarium is a long-term object in your home - it often sits in the same spot for years. Knowing the glass required no new raw materials and that the plant was grown under controlled conditions makes that purchase a more conscious one.
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