add method for deletion of orphaned items

[ampuscas]

Testing done

### Submitter checklist
- [ ] Make sure you are opening from a **topic/feature/bugfix branch** (right side) and not your main branch!
- [ ] Ensure that the pull request title represents the desired changelog entry
- [ ] Please describe what you did
- [ ] Link to relevant issues in GitHub or Jira
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- [ ] Ensure you have provided tests - that demonstrates feature works or fixes the issue

[rsandell]

You need to change your IDE settings so that it doesn't add/optimizes to * imports

[jglick]

Presumably this was meant to target #449, so please keep it in draft and give at least some sort of summary in the PR so other maintainers do not have investigate what this is and where it came from.