How wise to encourage use of incinerators in schools for disposing sanitary pads?

There has been a significant increase in the number of school and college going girls in the urban and semi-urban areas in India.  One of the chief reasons for the vast increase in the participation of girls in education sector is the availability of highly subsidized sanitary pads (SPs) . These have plastic base mostly made of pvc and the disposal of and the nuisance caused by increasingly large number of used SPs, nowadays, is being discussed in meetings of municipalities and pollution control boards.  Rules classify used SP as household waste but their hazardous nature in unmanageable numbers is creating problems in segregating as composting material. This grey area has led many entrepreneurs in Bangalore to exploit commercially for quick profits, many of which are environmentally unsound. In the recently held International Conference on Hospital Waste Management at Bangalore, there were a few agencies exhibiting mini-incinerators specifically for burning SPs by students in schools.  One of the agency had a prototype model which claimed to have a provision of burning 10 to 20 sanitary napkins at a time within a few minutes but had no adequate emission filtering system. Information brochures claimed emissions of CO within permissible limits with no information on dioxin emission.    Recently, there is a move by the Government of Karnataka to provide 500 such mini-incinerators to schools in and around Bangalore. This paper illustrates the status of such mini-incinerators that are planned to be installed in public places and the emission hazards they may create.