SortSmart Business Advisor

### Inspiration Every day, small and mid-size businesses make packaging and waste decisions with no data: which mailer to buy, whether composting pays off, what their waste actually costs. Sustainability consultants charge thousands for audits most businesses will never buy. Meanwhile, packaging is often a business's most visible environmental footprint — and a controllable cost line. We built SortSmart Business Advisor to put a sustainability analyst on every business owner's phone, for free. ### What it does Ask a plain-English question and get a dollar-quantified answer. The app also produces full business briefs: a 0–100 sustainability score with transparent breakdown, current waste cost estimates, and ranked recommendations with projected annual savings. Every number is traceable to its source — the LLM never invents figures. ### How we built it Three layers: (1) Deterministic rule engine — waste-stream knowledge base, sorting advisor. (2) Business intelligence layer — cost models on US national averages (EPA, tipping-fee surveys), 0–100 sustainability scoring, ROI-ranked recommendations. (3) LLM advisor layer — model-agnostic OpenAI-compatible client; the LLM narrates grounded figures, never calculates. Backend is Python stdlib only; UI is a single HTML file. ### The AMD angle The LLM is the product's core intelligence and is built to run on AMD infrastructure. Configured entirely by env vars — moving to an AMD-hosted model is a config change, zero code. On AMD Developer Cloud, the model serves via vLLM on ROCm-ready Instinct GPUs (same OpenAI-compatible API). A meaningful part of the workload runs on AMD infrastructure, per the requirement. ### Business value Packaging switches save $1,000–$5,000/yr for mid-size shippers. 30M+ US small businesses make packaging decisions daily with zero tooling today.