Sustainability-Oriented Circular Battery Lifecycle Governance for Renewable Energy Communities: Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Digital Passports, and Material-Recovery Accountability

Sustainability in renewable energy communities requires battery reuse and recovery benefits to be assessed alongside diagnostic reliability, governance costs and digital-infrastructure burdens. This study develops a sustainability-oriented permissioned governance design combining digital battery passports, signed lifecycle rules and material-recovery accountability. Four reference configurations are compared for 5000 synthetic retired packs across 100 replications. Favorable smart-contract outcomes follow assigned capabilities, not measured adoption effects. Equal-capability controls and two 38-dimensional uncertainty designs expose both positive and negative incremental outcomes. Fleet-composition, diagnostic-error and cost-ceiling analyses characterize sustainability trade-offs. Two synthetic hourly community profiles support 320 eight-year simulations: centralized and smart-contract labels deliver identical energy at equal capabilities, whereas shorter remaining life reduces service retention. A separate evidence-status overlay passes 34 targeted dispute, revocation and supersession tests; the preserved emulator rejects 350 selected misuse transactions. These establish bounded application-rule behavior, not physical-fraud detection or distributed-network security. Operational and manufacturing sensitivities show that hardware allocation and replacement can reverse a weak process benefit. The contribution is a reproducible framework for conditional sustainability screening and accountable governance, not inherent environmental superiority of blockchain, a complete lifecycle assessment or field validation.