Whenever you launch a rocket, you need flame-resistant wadding inside to protect the parachute or streamer from being melted into a plastic wad. What wadding does is trap the burning particles from the rocket engine's ejection charge so they can't reach the parachute. It also provides some insulation for the parachute, so it is less likely to melt from the tremendous heat of the ejection charge.

Using this recovery wadding is easy. Take several sheets of the wadding, and individually crumple them up into loose balls. Then drop them into the rocket before you insert the parachute. You need only enough to fill the tube to a depth of 2 times the diameter. For a typical rocket, that is about 3 sheets of wadding