And you can only pickup garbage that's in a similar orbit too.
In fact there's such an intercept being done soon, the mission extension vehicle (MEV) is going to rendezvous with an old but still controlled satellite in order to extend its useful life. This rendezvous is being done in the graveyard orbit in case something goes wrong.
A satellite is made out of metal and such things. You can heat that metal hot enough to melt it, but then its structural integrity will fail, and the liquid will disperse into a cloud of metal droplets while other satellite-parts drift away. When the metal droplets cool off, they will still remain in about the same orbit. This does not make an impact with any of these droplets particularly safe.
Transporting the amount of energy to properly vaporize metal is also problematic and expensive.
We do not possess tractor beam technology. Our tractors on this planet all use mechanical linkages. If we did have tractor beam technology, powering it would remain a problem.
> However, about 10 years ago, researchers found that the object may experience an optical pulling force (OPF) toward the source direction when illuminated by an unfocused beam, such as a diffraction-free (nondiffraction) Bessel beam, which is named an optical tractor beam (OTB). Although it seems counterintuitive, OPF has been theoretically proved and experimentally demonstrated within recent years, as will be reviewed in this paper.
Source: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photoni...
Although, there's a lot of distance to cover between the current state-of-the-art and actually capturing orbital debris.
The ESA is putting a lot of focused attention behind this very thing, to certain extents [0]
[0] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc7/paper/7...
Because the ∆v required to re-enter the atmosphere is significantly higher than that required to leave geosynchronous orbit for a higher graveyard orbit.
But yes, ultimately it will remain up there as "high speed shrapnel" - which is not an ideal situation, and continuing to treat disposal as we have may put us in a situation where these orbits become so full of high speed garbage that they are unusable. As a species, we need to do more work on cleaning up our space garbage before it's too late.
Kurzgesagt actually has a great video on the topic of space debris for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU