TIL while most ocean plastic comes from rivers, the majority of the waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is from fishing waste

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.