Your certificate expires
every twelve months.
Four numbers that set the whole timetable.
ISCC is not a badge you win once. It is an annual cycle with fixed windows, and almost every failure we are called into is a scheduling failure dressed up as a technical one — the gap assessment started too late for the mass balance rebuild to finish before the audit.
Three schemes. Different law behind each.
The schemes are often spoken about as if they were tiers of the same thing. They are not. ISCC EU carries EU legal weight under the Renewable Energy Directive; ISCC PLUS is voluntary and covers bio-based and circular material outside that framework; ISCC CORSIA answers to ICAO for aviation fuel. Which one you need is decided by your buyer and your market, not by ambition.
RED III had a transposition deadline of 21 May 2025, and traceability moved from good practice to legally enforceable. As of April 2026 not every member state had transposed it — which means your EU buyer’s obligations may be moving even while your own certificate stands still.
Six schemes, and the add-ons underneath them.
ISCC EU, PLUS and CORSIA are the three Thai exporters ask for by name. They are not the whole system — and picking the wrong one wastes an audit cycle, because the certificate you hold has to be the one your buyer’s regulator recognises.
The auditor cannot be your consultant.
ISCC requires certification bodies and their auditors to remain impartial, which means the body auditing you may not also consult for you. ISCC’s own guidance goes further and advises running an internal audit before the certification audit.
So the scheme simultaneously expects you to arrive prepared and forbids the only party who knows exactly what “prepared” looks like from preparing you. Thai companies already know this shape from TGO carbon verification, where a consultant may not verify their own work. It is the same structural split, and it is why preparation is bought separately — from someone who does not audit or certify anyone.
Rarely sustainability. Usually bookkeeping.
The intuition is that an ISCC audit tests whether your material is sustainable. In practice the sustainability criteria are usually satisfied long before the auditor arrives — what fails is the evidence that connects the claim to the batch.
An auditor picks a delivery at random and asks you to walk it backwards: which supplier, which self-declaration, which mass balance entry, which conversion factor, which outgoing sustainability declaration. Every link has to hold, in a document set someone else can read. That is a records problem, and records problems take weeks to fix, not days.
This is why the gap assessment comes first and why it is done unit by unit. A finding you discover eight weeks out is an administrative task. The same finding discovered on audit day is a non-conformity with a 40-day clock attached.
A feedstock chain to certify, ahead of the obligation.
Thailand is often described as having mandated a 1% sustainable aviation fuel blend from 2026. It has not. The instrument effective 1 January 2026 is a Department of Energy Business fuel-quality specification, gazetted 14 October 2025, which sets SAF content as a maximum — 5% co-processed, 50% neat — not a minimum. The ladder toward 8% is a roadmap in the national energy plan, and CAAT’s Phase 1 is voluntary under a memorandum of understanding signed with eight airlines in November 2025. The obligation is coming; it is not yet law.
The commercial pull, however, is already here. Thailand holds 197 valid ISCC certificates across 148 organisations — and 30 of the world’s 809 ISCC CORSIA certificates, roughly three times its share of ISCC overall. That chain is dominated by collecting points and traders in used cooking oil: exactly the operators a refinery now depends on, and exactly the ones least likely to have been audited against a management-system standard before.
On the materials side the pull is commercial rather than regulatory: buyers of certified bio-based and recycled content ask for ISCC PLUS, and Thai producers who cannot show it lose the premium rather than the contract. Meanwhile RED III has made traceability legally enforceable for anyone selling into Europe.
The result is a set of companies that need an annual certification cycle to run cleanly, in English, for an auditor — and that is squarely the work we already do.
Carbon numbers and the language they travel in.
ISCC preparation sits exactly where our two trades meet. The GHG side is the same methodology discipline as a TGO organisational footprint — boundaries, factors, evidence quality, verification readiness. The documentation side is a technical translation problem: an auditor has to read your evidence and reach the conclusion you intended.
We do not audit, verify or certify anyone, in any scheme. That is deliberate — it is what lets us sit on your side of the table without creating a conflict for the body that has to sign your certificate.
Before the scoping call.
The rest of the carbon and disclosure stack.
Send us the scheme, the units and the expiry date.
That is enough for us to come back with scope and timing. If the expiry is close, the honest answer may be that the gap assessment starts this month rather than next — we would rather tell you that now than after the audit.
Checkable, not claimable.
Client engagements run under NDA from the first email, so most names stay private. What is named here is named because it is already public — and everything above can be checked without asking us.
