Space junk clean-up required. Laser an option?

As we wait for yet another satellite - ROSAT - to come down to Earth, there are of course many thousands of bits of general junk that aren't coming down. The European Space Agency is currently tracking more than 16,000 objects, with all of them having serous potential to do serious damage to satellites or even the ISS, as shown in this video clip.

China recently make it a whole truckload worse by a test attack against one of their own satellites. The explosion added thousands of more items to the mix that has to be tracked.

Most of the junk is in close orbit, but a lot of it is spread right out to the geostationary orbit some 36,000 kilometres out. Clearly putting a ship up there to go collect them all is out of the question.

But what if there was a way to gently nudge them into a decaying orbit?

I've been wondering if a strong laser could be mounted on a satellite that is positioned out a fair way. This laser could target items when there is no risk from overrun of the beam. At the right times, it would gently push against the item in such a way as to bend the orbital path inwards just enough to start it on the way to becoming just another shooting star in the night sky. You'd only be targeting the little bits. The big chunks are easier to track and dodge.

Is such an idea feasible?