Space junk

The issue of space junk has always bothered me. Like pollution, it might not be worth while to pick up your garbage and avoid polluting the river, but there are costs to society if you don't. How do you get people to be responsible when the costs may not be borne by them?
I’ve noticed an unbelievable amount of glass and junk dumped along my river shoreline and it never seems to stop, maybe it migrates? I’ve heard stories of people in the old days throwing their garbage into the river from an open window! How could people not know or think this would create a toxic and dangerous legacy for future generations who actually swim in the river? I’ve stepped on a few jagged pieces of glass and steel (I even found an old rusted sword!) but so far, luckily I have only cut into my thick skin on my feet and not deeper to the bone. I declared war on the junk, especially glass. I dug into the commonly used areas, I raked it, sifted it with my fingers (no cuts). It just astounds and saddens me that people were so short-sighted that they just through this kind of persistent garbage into a beautiful river just footsteps from your home?
Like the early space race we probably never even thought of it. It’s a big place and the “flow” will just take it away to some other beach in the universe.
I guess we’ve come a long way from those blatant polluting acts but we’re still doing it on less obvious levels. At least we have a slightly better chance of cleaning up our mess here on Earth. I’ve heard of many efforts to try to clean up space and carve out a lucrative market, but so far the space junk vacuum has not been created. A giant roving magnet shield might work but I suspect a lot of the junk can't be captured this way. Maybe a sophisticated space drone that is able to catch up with and collect or neutralize the pieces of junk (the pieces could go into a museum?). Like cleanup efforts on Earth, the cost of cleaning the problem after the mess is made, is much more expensive than avoiding the problem beforehand. There are over 5,500 satellites up there that aren’t even being used!

This is our MO, we make the mess first through new technology, and we try to clean it up later with yet another new technology. In my case with the analogy of river shoreline pollution from past generations of short-term idiots, I have the time and luxury to slowly clean out my little piece of paradise.
How could we allow such an irresponsible act to begin in the first place? I hear the space junk up there now will likely remain for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe in the far future, much of this debris will coalesce into a small moon made of space junk, we could call it the Junky moon?
The real risk is a cascading failure, as these pieces of junk collide, they produce more and more debris. If we lose our GEO satellites we’ll be screwed. Bye bye cell phones and GPS. We must solve this problem before we launch thousands of more satellites in the next decade. This sounds bleak but Elon Musk is correct, sooner and hopefully much later, we will need to leave our beautiful Earth nest and find another home in the stars.