Tell us the date the keys are due and we work backwards from it. We do not do this work ourselves — we subcontract it to a certified hauling partner and stay accountable for it.
Zusashi Maintenance does not do any part of a junk removal job. Not the sorting, not the dismantling, not the loading, not the truck, not the disposal. We are a commercial cleaning company and hauling is not our trade.
You contact us, we bring in our certified hauling partner and subcontract the job to them. They survey the space, price it, and carry out the whole clear-out under their own environmental permission. You contract with Zusashi and deal with Zusashi, so one company is answerable if something goes wrong — but no Zusashi crew attends the clear-out.
It is the same arrangement we use for floor coating installation and for NFPA 96 hood interiors on our commercial kitchen cleaning work. One thing here is ours and is kept separate: cleaning the empty space afterwards, quoted on its own.
Commercial junk removal in the GTA is mostly one situation wearing different clothes: a lease is ending, and the premises have to go back in a condition somebody will accept, by a date that does not move. Everything else — how much there is, what it weighs, where the truck parks — is detail arranged around that date.
Most commercial leases require the premises returned empty of your goods, swept clean, your tenant fixtures and improvements removed, and any damage from their removal made good. The exact wording lives in the surrender and yield-up clauses and it varies more than people expect, which is why “broom-swept” causes so many arguments. It is worth reading those clauses the month you give notice rather than the week you hand back, because the answers change what has to happen and how long it takes.
What missing the date actually costs, roughly in order of expense. The deposit is first. Then most leases let the landlord complete the work and bill you — at a price they set, not one you shopped for. Then overholding: rent continuing, sometimes at an increased rate, until the premises are genuinely surrendered in the required condition. Against any of those, the difference between a planned clear-out and a rushed one is small.
So the honest answer to “how fast can you do it” is not a number. It is: tell us the date the keys are due and we work backwards from it. We will not promise a date before somebody has walked the space, because a promise made without a survey is the one that fails on the day you can least afford it.
A rough countdown for a typical unit. Bigger or more complicated spaces need more room; a small vacated office needs less. The point is the order, not the exact weeks.
| Before hand-back | What should be happening |
|---|---|
| The month you give notice | Read the surrender and yield-up clauses. Establish in writing which fixtures the landlord wants left and which removed — signage, counters, partitions, data cabinets, mezzanines, ducting. This single answer moves timelines by days. |
| 3–4 weeks | Survey. What is actually in the unit, including the basement, the mezzanine and the locked room nobody has opened. Written scope and price. Anything needing separate handling — suspect materials, refrigerant, drums, e-waste — identified now rather than found later. |
| 2–3 weeks | Clear days and haul days booked with the partner and, where relevant, with building or plaza management. This is the step that gets squeezed at month end when every other lease in the region is also expiring. |
| 1–2 weeks | Clear and sort, separating recyclable and reusable material as it goes. Anything with its own disposal route leaves down that route. |
| Final week | Make-good on fixture removal. Then the clean to hand-back standard — our own crews, separately quoted. Disposal record handed over. |
| Hand-back day | Walk the space with the landlord or their agent. Nothing found should be a surprise by this point. |
Shorter runs are done regularly and are not a problem in themselves. What a short run removes is the room to absorb a surprise, and older buildings supply surprises.
The four situations behave differently enough that the quote for one tells you almost nothing about the others.
This changed less than a year ago and most of the trade has not updated its pitch for it. Since 1 October 2025, under O. Reg. 119/25, a company moving waste beyond the boundaries of your site is operating a waste transportation system and needs a permission: a registration in the Environmental Activity and Sector Registry (EASR) for ordinary non-hazardous waste, or an Environmental Compliance Approval (ECA) where the waste or activity falls outside that. The number must be displayed on the vehicle.
Ontario does not issue a junk removal or waste hauling licence — it issues a registration or an approval. Anyone advertising a licence for this work is describing something the province does not grant. What you are actually checking for is that number, a current liability certificate and WSIB clearance. There is no informal exemption for a small load either: waste under the Environmental Protection Act expressly includes commercial waste and construction debris.
Ontario’s 3Rs regulations bind the generator of the waste. O. Reg. 103/94 requires source separation programmes for specified product, packaging and industrial wastes and reasonable efforts to ensure the separated material is actually reused or recycled. O. Reg. 102/94 requires waste audits, waste audit reports and waste reduction work plans from businesses and institutions in defined sub-sectors, and Ontario’s own definition of the industrial, commercial and institutional sector names stores, restaurants, offices and warehouses.
You cannot evidence “reasonable efforts” with a receipt for a truck. You evidence it with a named destination per load. Our free printable clean-out waste record is the sheet for it — date, what left, volume or weight, stream, named destination, the hauler’s permission number, diverted or not — totalling to a diversion rate at the foot. No fee, no account.
Asbestos stops everything — anything mixed with it is excluded from the EASR route entirely, and asbestos work in Ontario is separately regulated with its own hazard classification and mandatory training. Also out: hazardous and special waste (solvents, paints, adhesives, aerosols, fuels); biomedical waste and sharps; PCB-containing ballasts and mercury lamps; and refrigerant-bearing equipment, where the refrigerant is recovered by a qualified technician before the shell goes anywhere. Tires, batteries, electronics and lighting have their own producer-responsibility routes in Ontario — not forbidden, just cheaper and better handled down them.
Clear-outs are coordinated across the Greater Toronto Area. The east end is where the cluster is strongest and where each city has its own page, because the job genuinely differs by district — plaza retail is not industrial racking and neither is a downtown storefront with no dock.
Elsewhere in the GTA — Toronto, Markham, Vaughan, Mississauga, Brampton, Whitby and the rest — tell us where the unit is. We will say plainly whether we can put the right partner in front of you rather than taking the enquiry and working it out later.
Once the unit is empty the space still has to be handed back in a condition somebody will accept — floors, washrooms, kitchenettes, glass, light fittings, and the marks and adhesive left by whatever used to be bolted to the walls. That is ordinary commercial cleaning, our own crews do it, and it is the business we are actually in. Quoted separately from the clear-out; take one without the other if you prefer.
It is also the only real reason to route a clear-out through us rather than the cheapest number online. A junk removal company empties your unit and drives away. A cleaning company cleans around whatever is still in it. Booking both through one contact means the second crew arrives the day after the first finishes, rather than three weeks later once you have already failed the inspection.
General information for people running commercial buildings in Ontario, not legal advice about a specific lease or a specific waste stream. Lease obligations vary and the surrender and yield-up clauses of your own agreement govern; read them, and take advice on them if the wording is unclear. Regulatory references are to the Environmental Protection Act, Regulation 347, O. Reg. 119/25 and the 3Rs regulations (O. Reg. 102/94, 103/94 and 104/94) as published by the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. Zusashi Maintenance does not perform junk removal, hauling or waste disposal of any kind; that work is subcontracted in full to a certified hauling partner holding the relevant environmental permission.
Where the unit is, roughly what is in it, and the date the keys are due. We will put it in front of our certified hauling partner, come back with a written scope and price, and work the dates backwards from your deadline.
One row per load: what left, where it actually went, the hauler’s permission number, and a diversion rate at the foot. Feeds straight into an O. Reg. 102/94 waste audit. Print it or save as PDF.
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