Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Q: P&G, with roughly $68 billion in annual revenue, said it has invested millions in creating and testing refills for detergents over the years and is now trying to push in to mainstream beauty and body care refills – which are virtually  unheard of. It recently began offering some Olay face-cream jars with refill pouches on Olay.com, telling Reuters it has plans to expand the sales of the pouches in Europe early next year. “We’re learning on our legs so I don’t know that we’re in a position to say, ‘Hey, here’s the magic to selling refills,’” P&G spokesman Damon Jones said. Beauty products retailer The Body Shop, owned by Brazil’s Natura Cosmeticos SA NATU3.SA, says it plans to roll out “refill stations” in its stores globally next year, allowing shoppers to buy reusable metal containers to fill with Body Shop shower gels or creams. The company had offered refills at its stores in the early 1990s, but discontinued them in 2003, citing a lack of consumer demand. Unilever, which has set targets for reducing and recycling plastic by 2025, in October announced the planned launch of “refill sticks” of deodorants under its Dove line of personal care products on Loopstore.com. The website, operated by recycling company TerraCycle, offers consumers the chance to buy some household products in ultra-durable packaging with refills delivered to their doors, milkman-style. Across the consumer goods industry, results for refillable products have been mixed so far as many shoppers are far too set in their ways to be easily weaned from living in a throwaway culture. While refills are less expensive to purchase - generally priced at 20% to 30% less per item than the containers they are aimed to replenish, according to Unilever - shoppers have so far, for the most part, failed to snap them up, the companies said. SC Johnson & Son Inc, marketer of Windex and Pledge, said refills and concentrates so far have not played well with either Americans or Europeans over the decade they have been offered, with unit sales of such products pretty much flat. It pulled concentrated refills for Shout stain remover off the shelves because they were not selling very well. In 2010, Unilever put 20-liter tanks to dispense detergents in Walmart Inc’s (WMT.N) British supermarket chain Asda, and provided flexible pouches for customers to refill. But with leaky machines, safety and maintenance problems and the high costs of upkeep, Unilever said the tests fell short of expectations. Asda was also unhappy because the tanks occupied a lot of space. “None of them sell very well – it is a convenience issue,” SC Johnson CEO Fisk Johnson told Reuters. Johnson said some people find it painstaking to wash and refill bottles themselves while others worry that smaller bottles filled with concentrates are less “bang-for-your-buck” than the larger ones they have used for years. Still, the privately held company said it was expanding its refill offerings this year to address concerns surrounding plastic waste and is also testing refill stations for cleaning products with UK retailer Waitrose, owned by Britain’s John Lewis [JLPLC.UL]. The Waitrose tests are showing the first signs of progress in refill sales, Johnson said, and the company is now thinking of expanding the project. Even if consumers are comfortable using refills for some household goods, it is more complicated to sell them for products like Pantene shampoo and Olay creams, P&G spokesman Jones said. For instance, with beauty products, the look and feel of packaging is a big factor in creating and maintaining customer loyalty, while delivering an environmental benefit, he said. Some shoppers say they want to buy refillable products, but that the offerings are not available at many stores. Earlier this year, dozens of consumers took to social media to urge The Body Shop to bring back its refill counters. “Refill, refill, refill!” Twitter user @JaiChipperfield said on July 22, joining a thread in which several other shoppers demanded the return of refills. “Seems to me that judging by these comments your customers want to see the return of refills,” @JaiChipperfield added. “Me too, it would be brilliant to see that return.”  The Body Shop eventually responded to those pleas. “Now with the renewed focus on sustainability, we believe it is the right time to return with it,” Body Shop spokeswoman Lucy Muircroft told Reuters this week.

A: Procter & Gamble, rivals take refills into beauty aisle.
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Q: At a hearing in Miami federal court, U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz said she expects more concrete action and fewer promises from Carnival. “We’re not there. And we should be,” Seitz said. The cruise company is about halfway through a five-year probation sentence for a 2016 criminal pollution conviction. Chairman Micky Arison, who also owns the Miami Heat, and CEO Arnold Donald both insisted the company is doing a lot, but that it takes time to implement real changes at a company with 120,000 employees, more than 100 cruise ships and nine different brands. “We strive to be perfect,” Arison told the judge. “We won’t ever be perfect, but we are going to work toward that.” Earlier this year, Carnival admitted violating probation from the 2016 criminal case as its ships continued to cause environmental harm around the world since then. It was hit with a $20 million penalty, on top of a $40 million fine imposed in the original case. The environmental problems included allowing plastic to be discharged along with food into water; dumping “gray water” in prohibited places such as Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park; and permitting a corporate culture to persist that does not value compliance with environmental laws. Richard Udell, a Justice Department lawyer specializing in environmental enforcement, cited the recent inability of Carnival to detail what happens to the estimated 50 million plastic bottles used on its ships each year. Carnival, he said, simply told the government they don’t keep track of that because they are all supposedly recycled at some of its 700 destinations. Prosecutors want to know if that is really the case, or if often the bottles simply get dumped in the ocean or in landfills by other entities where Carnival ships dock. “If we don’t look, we won’t know, and if we don’t know, we don’t care,” Udell said. “We hope that we can get past this.” Carnival outlined many steps it is taking to phase out use of plastics on its ships, including the bottles, and that it would look deeper into the recycling issue. And Donald, the CEO, said the company’s leadership is making every effort to value environmental compliance just as much as ship safety and guest hospitality. “Compliance, environmental protection, safety _ it’s the first thing,” Donald said. “Without it, we don’t have a business.” Another status hearing is set for December. _____ Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Miamicurt

A: Judge: Carnival must fix ocean pollution issues faster.
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Q: The new proposals — the latest in a series of regulatory breaks granted by the administration for the sagging U.S. coal industry and for electric utilities using coal-fired power plants — reduces “heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country,” EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. One of the two proposals released by Wheeler on Monday would relax some 2015 requirements on coal-fired power plants for cleaning coal ash and toxic heavy metals — including mercury, arsenic and selenium — from plant wastewater before dumping it into waterways. The other would give some utilities up to several years more to clean up or close the more than 400 unlined coal ash dumps around the country that lie within a few feet of groundwater. The rewrite serves to “insert a grab bag of loopholes into what had been a strong national set of health protections,” Thomas Cmar, attorney for the coal program of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice. It’s “allowing the power industry to continue dumping toxic contaminants in our waterways at the expense of public health,” Cmar said. President Donald Trump has embraced a series of regulatory breaks and boosts sought by the coal and utility industries, including overturning U.S. support of the Paris climate accord and scrapping a legacy Obama climate program aimed at pushing dirtier-burning coal plants out of the country’s electrical grid. But coal production in the U.S. has continued falling amid a boom for natural gas and some renewable energy, and U.S. coal facilities are closing despite the proposed regulatory relief. Coal magnate Robert Murray, an influential Trump donor and fundraiser who had presented the new administration with a written “action plan” of desired breaks for the coal industry, sought bankruptcy protection for his Murray Energy last week. The Trump EPA says the relaxed wastewater rule will save $175 million annually in compliance costs. It contends that discharge of toxic contaminants into rivers, streams and creeks and ponds would actually go down, owing to what it says will be increased, voluntary wastewater cleanups by utilities. Conservation advocates and EPA regulators from the time of President Barack Obama call that claim unproven and unlikely. Wheeler said his agency was releasing two proposed coal regulatory rollbacks in one day “to provide more certainty to the American public.” “These proposed revisions support the Trump Administration’s commitment to responsible, reasonable regulations by taking a commonsense approach, which also protects public health and the environment,” Wheeler said. The nation’s largest public utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, had been trying for years to win exemption from the wastewater treatment rules for its largest coal-fired facility, arguing that it would be too expensive to bring the Cumberland Fossil Plant into compliance. The plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee, near the Kentucky border, accounts for up to one-sixth of the wastewater released in the country from cleaning out coal plant flues, millions of gallons per day more than any other plant. The plant releases that water into a section of the Cumberland River designated an Outstanding National Resource Water containing lake sturgeon that the state considers endangered. It’s near the Cross Creeks National Wildlife Refuge. The river is also a drinking water source for downstream communities. The EPA rejected an exception for TVA in its 2015 wastewater rules when it determined that the benefits to human health and the environment outweighed the costs of compliance. The proposed new rules reverse course, removing any limits on the amount of selenium and nitrate and nitrite the Cumberland plant can discharge into the river. According to EPA statistics, the plant dumped 1,300 pounds of toxic selenium in the river in 2016, the most recent year available. While selenium is an essential nutrient at lower levels of exposure, high levels can disrupt the nervous system and cause kidney and heart failure, and even death. The proposed rule states that the exception is based on cost because compliance “would likely put the facility at a competitive disadvantage with other coal-fired facilities.” The TVA said in a statement Monday that even without the selenium limits, treatment would remove some of the mineral from the wastewater being pumped downstream. On the other proposal, giving utilities more time to shut down leak-prone unlined coal ash pits, a spokeswoman with the industry’s American Public Power Association noted that operators will have to create new dump sites that meet standards. “This will undoubtedly take some time, and EPA acknowledges this reality” with its extended deadlines, spokeswoman Delia Patterson said. The U.S. coal industry, and utilities owning coal-fired power plants, have been hit hard on the market as natural gas and climate-friendly solar and wind power become dramatically cheaper. Other administration coal proposals include easing restrictions on smokestack releases of toxic mercury and on handling of coal plant waste ash. “In order to keep these plants alive they are literally gutting air and water quality protections for everyone in this country,” said Betsy Southerland, a science director in the EPA’s water office, who retired in 2017. “In the end I think it will only add a few years to the lives of these plants,” Southerland said. The administration plans a 60-day period for public comment on the two rule rewrites. ___ Loller reported from Nashville, Tennessee.

A:
Trump administration eases Obama-era rules on coal pollution.
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