Welp, I did something ridiculous. I was at an estate sale and saw an offer I couldn't refuse, and took home the hole lot...
After weighing them all out and crunching some numbers, I determined there are about 10,300 actual corks, about 100-150 Champagne corks, and another 100-150 of the plastic synthetic corks. If you were to drink one bottle of wine a night, and save the cork from it, it would take a little more than 29 years to amass this many. The red box in the foreground of the second picture has about 1,800 alone, tout the rest into context.
Now, onto a question...are there any valuable corks that may be hidden in here? The guy that sold me these said there were probably corks from the 60's that came from wine that was a couple hundred dollars a bottle. The earliest date I saw was 1971 and they ranged up until the mid 2000's, although I probably actually looked at less than 10% of them... So if anyone knows anything about older corks and can off some insight on them, or what i should do besides build something sweet or sell them off in lots please include your thoughts...