Following a series of mandatory inspections, the Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) on Tuesday seized and destroyed a number of cigarettes, electrical fittings and equipment, and safety matches that failed to comply with their standards.
The GNBS Product Compliance Department regularly monitors these items at the ports of entry and sales outlets upon importation.
Head of the Product Compliance Department, Quincy Troyer explained that inspectors regularly visit a number of business places with the requirements for the product they are inspecting and conduct an examination accordingly.
“Those products failing to meet the requirements of the standards, they’ll be placed on hold, pending the submission of a test certificate or conformity of assessment by the stakeholder. They will be given 21 days to adjust them on performance. After that 21 days would’ve expired, we are then forced to remove those products from the business place and have some amount of destruction involved,” Troyer said.
From January to date, inspectors seized 12,670 electrical fittings and equipment that were of poor quality and improperly labelled, including lamp holders, wires, cables, circuit breakers, power outlets and plugs.
Meanwhile, 4730 packs of cigarettes were destroyed for missing key details such as a pictorial warning taking over 60 per cent of the package, manufacturing date and batch numbers
Following the Tobacco Control Regulation, illicit cigarette packs are seized immediately.
In accordance with the Guyana National Standard (GYS) 28:2022 “Specification for safety matches,” 1340 packs of safety matches were seized for failure to comply with stipulated standards, most notably not being labelled in English.
