WE ALL know that smoking can kill. It pollutes the air and leads to untold damage. But does it harm the environment?

Apparently, yes, it does.

And the damage is three-fold. Firstly, for every cigarette smoked, trees are being cut down to make way for tobacco plantations.

Tobacco is a very fragile plant, and needs to be sprayed with pesticides and chemicals to avoid disease.

That is on top of the energy and water wasted in manufacturing cigarettes which could otherwise be used to produce food to feed the poor in the countries producing tobacco.

Secondly, wood, oil, coal or gas is needed to cure tobacco, contributing to climate change and severely affecting the environment.

It also takes trees to produce and package cigarettes.

Cigarette manufacturing uses four miles of paper an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes – that’s a tree for every 300 cigarettes produced.

Research has revealed 26% of the total deforestation in Malawi – one of the world’s biggest tobacco-producing nations – is a direct result of tobacco production.

Now, Smokefree North West is challenging the region’s young people to unveil the issue of deforestation within the tobacco industry with the launch of its short film competition.

The aim of the campaign is to encourage 14 to 18-year-olds to research the hard facts behind the tobacco industry, in order to expose the things we do not necessarily hear about, and suggest ways in which their research could be used in a short film. The three winning films will be produced as an online viral for YouTube and premiered and screened in the region’s cinemas.