The way economics is supposed to solve this sort of problem is via liability (and probably insurance). This doesn't require solving the space mining problem, just an actuarial problem.
But of course, the problem is that certain international actors wouldn't accept any sort of rules-based accountability for damage when it's caused by their space junk.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” ― Hayek
While it's true that plastics recycling is mostly a joke, in most places, companies manufacturing plastics aren't required to bear the cost of recycling in the first place (i.e. there has been no attempt to internalize the externalities in the first place), so I'm not sure it's even possible to invoke plastics recycling as a counterexample.
If there had been a push to make plastics manufacturers bear the cost of recycling, then the fact that recycling doesn't adequately cover the full externalities might be an example of the problems with this process (certainly there is an incentive for companies to try to downplay the negative externalities resulting from their products if they will be forced to bear the cost of dealing with those externalities).
The real way to make this process work would probably just be to tax plastics heavily based on their negative externalities and use that money to dispose of them.
However, this would likely make goods using plastics prohibitively expensive for consumers, so it might be unpopular, but it would likely cause people to use alternative materials that are more expensive than plastics are currently, which would be beneficial.
Even if they only kept up with inflation, bottle deposits would be at least 25¢ today. The federal government should treat the microplastic tsunami like it did the hazard of drunk driving: tie federal highway funding to states adoption of universal plastic deposit laws.
Just my 50¢
[0] https://www.alternet.org/2005/10/the_hidden_life_of_garbage
This is already a major problem with long-tail risk activities (industrial plants, mines, oil wells) or those with numerous small operators (shipping, itself the origin of the modern insurance industry). Established operators sell off or otherwise divest high-risk operations, units, vessels, etc., to smaller entities which can extract remaining value then walk away from the ultimate costs.
Add in to this problems of international law (and its even more problematic variants, marine and aerospace law), and you've got problems poorly addressed by market-bases solutions.
"If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_anomaly
but other orbit changes in LEO can be about as expensive as launching a rocket up from Earth. There is no point, for instance, in sending a cargo to the space station and then launching it in a polar orbit. The space station we have has no potential as a staging area to go to the Moon or Mars because it is in the wrong orbit. The cost of moving things around is one reason why Terra is the low-cost source of resources throughout the solar system still.
Now you can move space junk around without using fuel, instead you can hit the space junk with a laser which will evaporate off a bit of the surface and push it:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3835
the usual idea is that you use this to deorbit space junk but you could also use this to change the orbit of a piece so maybe you could gather a bunch of them in one place or maybe somebody could use such a laser to engineer collisions. The laser they describe in that paper is almost like a tractor or pressor beam from science fiction.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/delta-v-chart...
IMO Orbital mechanics is very unintuitive, and one of the results in people asking things like "why not shoot all of our trash into the Sun?"
Everything else is in the realm of science fiction.
This is a giant "if" that generates enough gravity to pull all the space junk into a ball.
A Falcon 9 can put ~20,000kg into LEO for ~$40M - so $2/g.
The cost of deorbiting little space junk is many orders of magnitude higher than that. And deorbiting is far cheaper than capturing and recycling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
No point to looking up the current exact price, nor payload, when removing orbital junk is multi-million-dollar ante game, and state-of-the-art is "a few engineering prototypes exist". The bottom line (that we're many orders of magnitude away from economically recovering small space junk as raw material) would be true whether the cost of launch was $20/g or $0.20/g.
Again, that's cost not price. That's what the state of the art can do in a best case, but probably highly repeatable and reliable scenario, today.