I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why we haven’t done this yet. Too expensive? Would launching it into the sun cause the smoke (if there is even smoke in space) to find its way back to Earth, therefore polluting the air?
This is an incredibly stupid question.
I also have this incredibly stupid idea to build a very long pipe that goes all the way outside earth’s gravity pull, then launch all the garbage through it with a mechanism similar to a railgun. It doesn’t have to be thrown directly at the sun, just enough to launch stuff out of orbit.
That’s basically a space elevator (though space elevators are shorter and held up by centripetal forces). Unfortunately they’re quite outside our technological capabilities at the moment.
There is no such thing as “outside earth’s gravity pull”. You can compensate with “centrifugal” force but you’ll need to position the point of mass in geostationary orbit and hang the rest of the structure off it (idea known as space elevator). However, there is no material whose tensile strength will support its own weight at this length. Steel cables max out at a few hundred meters at surface gravity.