Although cars are becoming cleaner and cleaner in terms of exhaust pollution noxious, and that hybrids and electric vehicles seem to get on the menu of new cars buyers more often as well, plenty of big cities around the world are still suffering from a not so clean air to breath,and sometimes quite non breathable.
There are folks like 
For them, some big cities around the world including Cluj-Napoca, one of the biggest cities in Romania, have found a new solution in trying to clean the air a bit and make it more breathable. No, it's not trees, nor more electric cars, or any type of tech. It's "pollution eating lichens".
Well, it's actually lichen panels wort 70,000 euros each that will help cleaning the air in Cluj, as it does in other major cities around the world. "City Trees” is the name of the project and you should know that such a panel, worth 70,000 euros is actually the size of a regular commercial panel that you could see near your office building, but way more efficient than all the trees in the area.
According to the report on how this Romanian city will fight pollution using lichens panels, it seems that one such panel is equivalent to about 275 trees in terms of efficiency in cleaning the air. Cluj Napoca will invest over 200,000 euros in this project and it actually follows suit with Bruxelles, London, Berlin, Oslo, Hong Kong and Paris.
Finally, a Romanian city is replicating some good initiative taken years ago by big and important cities around the world. Luckily I still live in a small town that doesn't deal with such problems, but I lived in Bucharest, the capital of Romania having around 4 million inhabitants and lots of cars, and I know how's air in such big city.
I don't know how many trees one can plant with these 70,000 euros that you're supposed to pay for such a panel of the future, but I get the point of such a project. Big cities are suffering from crowdy streets and public areas and fitting hundreds of trees to "eat all the pollution" of such cities, or at least as much as possible, generated by their inhabitants, would be almost mission impossible. Hence... lichens came as a great helping hand. Size matters, you know...
Not too long ago electric vehicles were praised for being some sort of a short term perfect solution for reducing grey air around the world, but it seems that producing the batteries for these types of cars is quite damaging for the environment, so buying a diesel, petrol or an electric vehicle is pretty much the same when thinking green.
Bottom line the pollution eating lichens is not a cheap alternative to trees, for sure, but it's practical, quite clean, and it's indeed a solution. Folks that live in crowded cities know how bad air really feels in your lungs. If any of you has seen such panels in real life please let me know, curios about the project.
Thanks for attention,
Adrian