I remember asking once, we don't we just shoot our surplus trash off into the sun and was told that by the cost of launching it outweighs the benefits. Fair!
But what about all of the old satellites and space stations? Why don't we just send a giant magnet around the earth once or twice and then slingshot all that space junk into the sun and thus giving all science fiction writers (when they return from their strike) a plot point they can no longer use in their film scripts?
Seriously though, without the cost of breaching the atmosphere, this seems really cheap to pull, why don't we do this? Why isn't this a standard thing?
That's not how orbits work. You can't just point at the sun, accelerate slowly for 10 seconds and then you will arrive in a few hundred years. If you did that, you would still orbit the sun, just in a slightly different orbit than before. To actually reach it or get near enough to it that the junk burns off, you have to expend a lot of energy.
But if it could get into the orbit of the sun wouldn't it still burn up?
Well this is easily answerable given our planet orbits the sun and doesn’t burn up. Even Pluto which is very far away orbits the sun.
How close would we need to get? I mean we sent something to Mercury after all
It already is in orbit of the sun. Getting it to a new orbit of the sun will no more get it to the sun than keeping it on Earth unless you use a lot of energy.
It would still take a lot of energy to get it close enough for it be effected by the sun. It would probably be easier to go further out and get a gravity assist from another planet or one of their moons.