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This is the first mention of the idea of "orbital debris" (NASA terminology) or space rubbish, as far as I know.

The individual particles of the material spread, having been given motions tangental to the arc of the steward’s swing. Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space, and years later it was still spreading. Possessing as it did the velocity of the ship at the time of being ejected, it was moving many times faster than the natural meteor swarms which fell around the Sun. Its velocity might be great enough to take it weU beyond the orbits of the major planets before the tremendous gravity pull of the primary first braked it to a halt and then began accelerating it Sunwards again. By this time it would have expanded and joined with other ejections which had occurred from the same ship hours or maybe days earlier while the vessel had held the same course and velocity, and a too-close contact with the gravity-field of a planet might have set it spinning about itself, or condensed it or pulled it farther apart. (From 'Deadly Litter' by James White) And decades later it would arrive where the traffic was heaviest, within the orbits of the inner planets, a deadly, superfast and ultra-destructive meteor shower extending across hundreds or thousands of miles of space. Space was vast and the particles of such a swarm were so widely separated that a ship might run through it without damage. But there had been an awful lot of rubbish dumped into space in one hundred and fifty years and a ship might not always be lucky. There had been a time when people thought it funny that a ship could be wrecked by a few tea leaves or a frigid, iron-hard potato peeling. But among spacemen, Gregory thought sourly, it was the sort of joke at which you died laughing.

Technovelgy from Deadly Litter, by James White. Published by Science Fiction Adventures in 1960 Additional resources -

There was some discussion of this general topic in the 1950's, as the promise of space-bound rockets was seen to come to fruition. Astronomer Fred Whipple was concerned about undetected asteroids might be more common than previously supposed. In 1946, Whipple stated his belief that a moon-bound spaceship could have as much as a one in twenty-five probability of being struck by a meteoroid. Astronomer William Henry Pickering was also concerned that there might be small natural satellites orbiting the Earth that had escaped observation.

Compare to Operation Cleanup from The Fountains of Paradise (1978) by Arthur C. Clarke

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Deadly Litter
  More Ideas and Technology by James White
  Tech news articles related to Deadly Litter
  Tech news articles related to works by James White

Space Rubbish-related news articles:
  - Debris Cloud From Chinese ASAT A Menace To Space Lanes
  - Cloud Of Space Rubbish From China's Long March Rocket

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