Dubai: Standardised weighing scales across supermarkets, butcheries and other food retailers will come into place this year, the civic body confirmed yesterday.
Dubai Central Laboratory (DCL) on Tuesday became the licensing body responsible in the Accurate Balance project, which is aimed at checking the accuracy of weighing scales in all types of commercial outlets.
Dubai Municipality is carrying out the project, in cooperation with Emirates Authority for Standardisation and Metrology, to ensure that all food outlets use the metric system.
“Legal weights and measures are fundamental to a sustainable trading economy. The concept of sale and purchase cannot exist without them,” said Hawa Bastaki, Director of DCL.
‘In our everyday lives, people make many purchases that rely on their confidence in the system that ensures correct measures, and likewise businesses need to know they are trading in a fair marketplace where no one has an unfair competitive advantage,” she said.
In the beginning of last year, DCL started to check accuracy of weighing scales in gold and jewellery shops, and the legal calibration in the future is expected to include measuring instruments in taxi meters, fuel meters, pre-packaged containers, and compressed gas counters.
Once the project comes into effect, consumers only have to ensure that a verification sticker has been stamped on the weighing scale by the Laboratory.
“DCL inspectors will ensure that the balances are in line with international standards, that the measurements they show are clearly and correctly visible to the customer and that they use the international metric system,” said Fareed Esmail, an engineer at DCL.
