What absolute clickbait fraud The Guardian is peddling.

Meteorites add a near-continuous supply of conductive ions to the ionosphere, of greater aggregate mass than all the space junk. Most microwave backscatter is meteoritic sodium ions in the outer ionosphere, for example.

Aluminum particles are conductive. Until they encounter the O- in the upper atmosphere. Alumina is a very poor conductor. Some aluminium particles will be too large to oxidize, those are also too large to remain suspended. If it was room temperature superconductors instead of aluminium, we still wouldn't care.

Our ionosphere is not going anywhere, its been receiving conductive space junk on a massive scale for billions of years.

And our magnetosphere is a dozen orders of magnitude too powerful for traces of plasma to affect. If Starfish Prime couldn't hurt it... 

The subject of the article knows all of this, even if the journalist does not. 

Someone is bitter about SpaceX, has zero professional pride, and is desperate for grant money. And knows well how innumerate and ignorant Guardian journalists are. He should run for public office instead...