A (relatively) low-tech approach to removing space trash is covered in an interesting article in The Verge.
There is a whole lot of junk (debris from broken satellites, boosters and so on) orbiting around above our atmosphere. The more that accumulates, the more danger the stuff poses to various satellites and manned missions; even a small particle hitting you at high speed can pack quite a punch, and destroy an expensive piece of equipment.
The British satellite uses a big net to capture a given piece of debris; the current experiment is just to see if a net works. Once you've netted the thing, the idea is, you can then use a variety of means to slow it down so that it falls out of orbit, and burns up in the atmosphere (with luck, instead of hitting someone on the head).
Seems to me that the basic issue (if the net, or another technology, works) is akin to the experimenting going on to clean junk out of our oceans: there is a lot of junk, spread over a lot of area. Much expense involved to do the job.
Much easier to catch the stuff where it originates, or not spew it into the environment (ocean or space) in the first place. It's a bit similar to why we push our commercial janitorial clients to rent treated walk-off mats for their building entrances: the mats stop the soil from being tracked in, so you have soil to remove from a dozen or two square feet of mat, and not 20,000 square feet of carpet or tile.
The mat is cheaper than my janitor.
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