Old link, but I hadn’t realized the caveat until today. Basically, most of the waste that’s accumulated in the GPGP is from industrial scale fishing (US, China, etc). I’ve long known that it isn’t a big island (you can’t even photograph it; it’s just slightly murky water for miles and miles), but for some reason I thought this implied that most oceanic waste is fishing related. That’s not right, see the wikipedia page.
one of the most basic aspects of the dystopia for me is having to be careful about eathing to much of some fish due to mercury poisoning. Fish. People talk about grains and farming as the driver of civilization but to me its fish.