The History and Importance of Commercial Cleaning

Before germs: cleanliness as an accident of decency

For most of human history, cleaning was guided by intuition, religion and social custom rather than science. Cleanliness signalled respectability and warded off bad smells, and bad smells were widely believed to be the disease. This was the miasma theory — the idea, dominant into the 19th century, that illnesses such as cholera and plague were spread by "bad air" rising from filth and decay. It was wrong about the mechanism, but it produced one accidentally useful conclusion: clean up the filth, and people get sick less often.

That accidental insight drove the sanitary movement of Victorian Britain. In 1842, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, drawing a direct line between squalid living conditions and early death. His work helped justify the first great public-health infrastructure of the modern world: clean water, sewers and waste removal. When London's "Great Stink" of 1858 made the Thames unbearable, engineer Joseph Bazalgette built the sewer network that still underlies the city. Sanitation had become a civic responsibility.

The revolution: cleaning becomes science

Between roughly 1847 and 1890, a handful of physicians and scientists overturned miasma theory and, in doing so, turned cleaning into a measurable intervention. Their discoveries are the intellectual foundation of every cleaning protocol in use today.

• Ignaz Semmelweis (1847). Working in a Vienna maternity clinic, Semmelweis noticed that women whose deliveries were attended by doctors coming straight from the autopsy room died of "childbed fever" far more often than those attended by midwives. He ordered handwashing with a chlorinated-lime solution and mortality collapsed. He could not explain why it worked and was largely rejected in his lifetime — but he had demonstrated that an invisible something on unwashed hands was killing patients.
• John Snow (1854). During a cholera outbreak in London's Soho, the physician John Snow mapped cases and traced them to a single contaminated public water pump on Broad Street. Removing the pump handle helped end the outbreak. Snow's investigation is a founding moment of modern epidemiology and showed disease travelling through a physical, cleanable medium — not the air.
• Florence Nightingale (1854–56). In the military hospitals of the Crimean War, Nightingale found soldiers dying less from battle wounds than from infections bred by filth. Her insistence on ventilation, clean linen, sanitation and hygiene dramatically reduced deaths, and her later statistical writing — including Notes on Nursing (1859) — helped make sanitary practice a professional standard rather than a matter of opinion.
• Pasteur, Koch and Lister (1860s–1880s). Louis Pasteur's experiments established that micro-organisms cause fermentation and disease; Robert Koch identified the specific bacteria behind anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera and formalised the criteria linking a microbe to a disease; and the surgeon Joseph Lister applied the theory directly, introducing antiseptic technique (carbolic acid) that transformed the survival rates of surgery. Germ theory was now established fact.

The consequence for cleaning was profound. Once you accept that specific, invisible organisms live on surfaces and cause specific diseases, "cleaning" splits into two distinct acts that professionals still separate today: cleaning (physically removing soil and organic matter) and disinfection (killing the microorganisms that remain). Everything from a modern dental office's two-step surface protocol to a hospital's terminal clean descends directly from this distinction.

The birth of an industry

Science explained why to clean; industrialisation created the demand. As the 19th and early 20th centuries filled cities with factories, offices, schools, hospitals and apartment blocks, someone had to maintain them. The building caretaker and janitor became fixtures of urban life, and cleaning shifted from a household task into paid, organised labour.

Technology industrialised the work itself. In 1901, the British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth patented a powered vacuum cleaner; in 1907, the American janitor James Murray Spangler built a portable electric version and sold the rights to William Hoover, whose name became a byword for vacuuming. Powered floor machines, purpose-built chemical cleaners and, later, microfibre and colour-coded equipment steadily raised what one worker could clean, and how well. After the Second World War, the building-service contractor — the company that cleans other organisations' premises under contract — emerged as a distinct industry in North America. Trade bodies followed; the association now known as ISSA (the worldwide cleaning industry association) traces its roots to 1923.

Standards, safety and the rise of "environmental services"

The mid-to-late 20th century professionalised cleaning in two directions at once: worker safety and infection control.

On safety, governments recognised that cleaning is hazardous work — chemicals, wet floors, heavy equipment, biological waste. The United States created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970, and Canada introduced the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) in 1988 to standardise the labelling, data sheets and training for hazardous products — including cleaning chemicals. Cleaning became a regulated occupation, not just a job.

On infection control, hospitals learned the hard way that the building itself transmits disease. Healthcare-associated infections — caused by organisms such as MRSA, C. difficile and VRE — spread on high-touch surfaces, equipment and hands. Hospital "housekeeping" was reconceived as environmental services (EVS): a clinical support function whose cleaning routines, products, contact times and documentation are treated as a genuine control measure against infection, not a cosmetic afterthought. The person cleaning a patient room became part of the infection-prevention team.

The infection-control era: SARS, and a wake-up call for Ontario

For Ontario, the decisive modern turning point was SARS in 2003. The Greater Toronto Area was the largest centre of the outbreak outside Asia, and it resulted in 44 deaths in the Toronto area. The crisis exposed serious gaps in infection prevention and control across the health system. The subsequent public inquiry — the Ontario SARS Commission led by Justice Archie Campbell — drove sweeping reforms, and the province built new public-health institutions, including the agency now known as Public Health Ontario and its expert body PIDAC (the Provincial Infectious Diseases Advisory Committee).

PIDAC's Best Practices for Environmental Cleaning for Prevention and Control of Infections is exactly the kind of document that closed the loop between 19th-century science and 21st-century practice: it specifies how, how often and with what a healthcare environment must be cleaned, and it expects that cleaning to be documented. Cleaning had become auditable public-health work with a paper trail — a direct descendant of Semmelweis's chlorinated lime, now written into policy.

COVID-19 and the visibility of cleaning

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, cleaning became, briefly, one of the most visible jobs in the world. Enhanced environmental cleaning and disinfection of high-touch surfaces moved to the centre of every organisation's response. Cleaners were reclassified as essential frontline workers. The pandemic accelerated trends already underway: rigorous protocols, product and contact-time literacy, training, and above all documentation — the signed log proving a space was cleaned. Some of the reflex "hygiene theatre" of 2020 has since been recalibrated as the science of transmission matured, but the lasting legacy is a public that now understands cleaning as health infrastructure, and a workforce expected to prove its work.

Why commercial cleaning matters today

Strip away the history and the case for professional cleaning rests on five enduring pillars:

• Public health. Shared surfaces, washrooms, kitchens and equipment are transmission points for illness. Systematic cleaning and disinfection reduce that transmission — the single most direct benefit, and the reason regulated sectors mandate it.
• Safety. Clean, orderly premises prevent slips, trips and falls, control combustible dust and biological hazards, and keep egress routes clear. In a warehouse or kitchen, cleaning is a safety control, not housekeeping.
• Productivity. A cleaner environment means fewer illness-related absences and better focus. Organisations increasingly treat cleaning as an investment in output, not a discretionary cost.
• Asset protection. Floors, carpets, equipment and building surfaces last far longer under maintenance than under neglect. Deferred cleaning is deferred capital cost.
• Compliance and trust. In healthcare, dentistry, food service and child care, documented cleaning is a legal and licensing requirement. Beyond compliance, a visibly clean, well-run space is a signal of competence that customers, patients and staff read instantly.

There is also a simple economic reality: cleaning is one of the largest bodies of work in any developed economy. Janitors, cleaners and building-maintenance staff form one of the most common occupational groups, sustaining an enormous global professional-cleaning industry. It is, quite literally, foundational labour — the maintenance layer that lets every other activity happen safely.

The modern Ontario framework

Today's Ontario cleaning standards are the accumulated sediment of this whole history — each rule a response to a lesson once learned the hard way. A professional operator now works within a web of overlapping requirements, including:

• Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) — general workplace cleanliness duties, and, since July 1, 2025, a specific requirement for employers to keep records of washroom cleaning (introduced by Bill 190).
• RCDSO infection prevention and control standards — environmental cleaning and reprocessing requirements for dental offices, with expected documentation.
• Child Care and Early Years Act (O. Reg 137/15) and Public Health Ontario's cleaning schedule for licensed child care.
• Food premises regulation (O. Reg 493/17) and DineSafe-style inspection for restaurants and food service.
• WHMIS and WSIB — hazardous-product handling and workplace-injury coverage across every sector.

What unites them is the through-line of this entire story: cleaning must be done to a standard, with the right products, and proven with a record. The signed cleaning log posted at a washroom or filed in a dental office's binder is the modern, bureaucratic descendant of the moment a Vienna obstetrician first asked his colleagues to wash their hands.

Key milestones in the history of cleaning

A discipline hiding in plain sight

The arc of this history runs from superstition to science to system: from cleaning as a matter of decency, to cleaning as a proven defence against disease, to cleaning as a documented, regulated, professional discipline. The mop and the microfibre cloth look humble, but behind them stands 180 years of epidemiology, engineering and hard-won institutional memory. When a commercial cleaning crew disinfects a clinic's high-touch surfaces to a set contact time and signs the log, they are the working end of everything Semmelweis, Snow and Nightingale set in motion. That is why the industry deserves to be understood not as a cost line, but as what it has always quietly been — a pillar of public health.

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References & further reading

This article synthesises well-documented public-health history and current Ontario regulation. Readers and researchers can consult the primary and authoritative sources below:

• Chadwick, E. (1842). Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain.
• Snow, J. (1855). On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (2nd ed.).
• Nightingale, F. (1859). Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not.
• Public Health Ontario / PIDAC. Best Practices for Environmental Cleaning for Prevention and Control of Infections in All Health Care Settings.
• Government of Ontario. The SARS Commission (Campbell Commission) Final Report (2006).
• U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guidelines for Environmental Infection Control in Health-Care Facilities.
• World Health Organization. Environmental cleaning and infection prevention and control guidance.
• Occupational Health and Safety Act (Ontario) and WHMIS / Hazardous Products Regulations (Canada).
• ISSA — The Worldwide Cleaning Industry Association (industry history and standards).

Note: figures and dates reflect widely published historical and public-health records. Where an exact statistic matters to your own work, verify it against the primary source cited above.

Zusashi Maintenance is a Greater Toronto Area commercial cleaning company operating in this tradition — cleaning to documented, compliance-ready standards across healthcare, dental, food-service and office environments. If you'd like a walkthrough of what a professional, documented cleaning program looks like for your facility, get in touch.